Hey dubmdell,
Hey no problem about the delay. I'm kind of glad it took you awhile, honestly. I was busy too (and am busy). Take your time. :-P
"Actually, I always said "geocentric universe" and that is demonstrably false because the center of the universe is nothing, as I understand it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the focal point from which everything is moving away an empty space?"
There is a preferred frame in cosmology, and it's the frame of expansion, that's true. It's still a convention, though, and (as I understand it anyway) one can't really say in a magisterial way that any point is or is not the center of the universe. Anyway, I'll allow that you were precise and it was a fine point to begin with, and move on.
"I cite the 13th/14th century AD Muslims as an example of how a thought has been conserved for centuries. The idea of the gods being in the sky is very ancient and is the crux of the Babel myth. They could be like the gods if they built a tower to the sky, because that is where the gods lived. And I already told you, the horoscopes have meaning because a particular star (read: planet; read: god) is in your astrological sign. This ancient cosmological understanding of "stars (planets) = gods" is so well documented, I don't think sources are necessary, but if you think differently, I can provide some sources."
What I object to is your horrible treatment of every "old belief" as equivalent, as though you can study what was believed by the ancient Chinese by studying the beliefs of the Incas, or you can study the latter by studying the beliefs of 18th century Peruvian Catholics. Yes, of course SOME ancient cultures worshiped stars, some worshiped idols, some worshiped both, and some worshiped neither. I will continue to view any such equating as absolutely the worst, most irresponsible methodology, and in future posts will dismiss it with a sentence.
"Haha, I love this defense of how different the Hebrews were.
Let's pick apart "no idols.""
Touche about Hebrew idolatry. However, it doesn't really go to my point. The Hebrew Scriptures were (typically) written by people pretty steeped in monotheistic Hebrew theology, often decrying the idolatry. The point was that one could not easily assume that something that was true in the _theology_ of the neighboring polytheists would be true in the theology of the extremely different Hebrew monotheistic religion.
A modern day analogy might go like this:
A: "The theology of Saint Thomas Christians likely includes belief in reincarnation. Most of the people around them believe in it."
B: "Well, true, though most of the people around them are Hindus, while they're monotheists. It might not be possible to just transport that. They could have a very different theology."
A: "Please! Saint Thomas Christians are notorious backsliders. They frequently buy Hindu statues to put in their homes."
In brief, your point that the Hebrews did turn to idol worship, while correct, is a red herring in the present conversation.
Let us turn now to your discussion of the location of God. It is real hubris, in my opinion, to go back and, at least early in the interpretive process, conclude that people writing 3000 years ago were wrong about the theology of their own religion, rather than thinking that, oh, I don't know, maybe there's some subtlety going on that I should plumb for. It has been the uniform teaching of both the Jewish and Christian religions that God (at least the Father and Spirit, for Christian theology) cannot be contained in any one place -- He is omnipresent, and everywhere all the time. Any reference to His being in one place at a particular time means that He was present there in a particular additional way in which He was not present at others. In short, there are different modes of God's presence, some of which involve His interacting very specifically and intensely with a particular point in space and time, and others of which are His usual presence everywhere. Both are clearly taught everywhere in Scripture. The presence of the Holy Spirit, for example, in believers is straightforwardly analogous to the presence of God in the temple or tabernacle in the OT (and the NT writers frequently make the analogy). (Jeremiah 23:23-24 is a really nice source for omnipresence that I didn't mention before.
Both in the OT and the NT, "heaven" is of course used both to refer to the physical heavens, and to the dwelling place of God specifically (presumably, and certainly as depicted in Revelation or in various of the OT prophets such as Isaiah, God is certainly present in a special way in this latter heaven). Hence, the NT's references to heaven should in no way be taken to negate the OT's descriptions of omnipresence. (See e.g. Ephesians 1:23 for a NT allusion to the doctrine, one of a few NT passages that blur what you try to present as a cut-and-dried theology of God's location).
I see you said "without conceding but also without asserting," so I'll halfway withdraw my hubris remark. Suffice to say, I think it runs roughshod over the OT to assert that the passages I pasted before entail a "very wrong" view of God. They simply entail a subtle view, which is not surprising, given that we're talking about God (what does it mean for the Creator of the universe, who preexists all space and time, to exist inside a tent? Yeah, we're probably never going to be able to give a full account of that one).
"Although I didn't think I was asserting that he was an ignorant primitive?"
Not explicitly, but you treat all the OT writers as though they are.
"Anyway, even children understand that rain comes from clouds (and on those days where you get rain and not a cloud in the sky, surely the child asks "Where's the rain coming from since there are no clouds?") but it would be foolish to assert the child understands precipitation cycle. The cycle wasn't even formally (and relatively correctly) stated until the 16th century AD by Bernard Palissy."
Well, that may all be true, but it seems a very poor refutation of the fact that the book of Job DOES state something very like the precipitation cycle. I don't say that the ancient Hebrews realized that the sun was causing evaporation into clouds, etc., etc., but it does seem clear they realized the clouds arose from the sea, and dumped their water in precipitation, and it then returned to the sea. See also I Kings 18:41 ff. My point is merely that there is every good reason for assuming that the "storehouses of snow" imagery is COMPLETELY figurative language, which you had denied. And when I say every reason, I mean every reason right in the text. I'm not imposing stuff. You, on the other hand, are constantly bringing in extratextual sources and trying to use them to do violence to the reading of the text. (E.g., 11th century Muslims).
"The notion of something running back to the place from where it came is not assigned only to water: the sun has this same attribute. Which returns us to the original problem: does the sun revolve around the earth in ancient cosmology?"
First of all, again, there is no such thing as "ancient cosmology." There is ancient Hebrew cosmology, ancient Greek cosmology, etc., etc.
The Egyptians, for example, believed that the sun was a part of the body of their god Ra. Whether they believed Ra went around the earth, I can't say I have any idea, but needless to say, the Hebrews' idea was pretty different. What I do know is that the description given in the verse you quote is a perfectly accurate description of the sun's motion from the earth's frame, one that we still use today.
I'm not too sure where your Germanic tangent was going, but it was all very interesting. :-) I'll just leave it there.
I'm afraid I don't understand completely your distinction between interpreting and reading in context. Perhaps you can elaborate? In any case, I agree that we should read things in context. (Though I disagree that we should be very sloppy about analyzing that context, which of course you know I think you're doing ;-)).
"The problem I have with saying "oh well, this is poetry so we understand it one way" or any variant dismissal of the text like that ...."
Oh dear! I hope I did not imply we should ever dismiss ANY text in the Bible. Understanding that it's poetry is helpful in interpreting it, but it doesn't at all mean that we should discard it, or that it doesn't have anything substantial to tell us. Just for example, the passage in Job that we've been discussing so much may tell us very little about how snow gets made, but it certainly tells us Who does know, and Who controls it. That, it would be fair to say, is a point that is being forcefully made, albeit in poetry, and I don't at all think you could throw away that point because it's being poetically made.
I also do think that one can even take finer points from some poetic language. It really just depends on interpreting the text. There is no general rule here.
I should probably also comment here that, although I gave the example of the Mississippi river to show how I thought interpretation and assertion should / could work in a context where a technical misstatement was part of the language in the original (and thus, how there was no falsehood involved), that was intended as a nail-in-the-coffin kind of point to your initial claim that there are errors in Scripture because of XYZ. In truth, I don't actually allow that you've so far actually exhibited a passage that even has the defects there laid out.
"In one breath the Christian will say "well clearly this doctrine is true because of one verse in poetry" but then dismiss another doctrine that is grounded in three different verses (all poetry, of course!). What's the difference?"
Well, hopefully, they are doing good exegesis of both passages and taking away the claim that is actually being made or implied as the content of each one.
Examples from modern poetry:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
It would be wrong to take from this that Wordsworth could fly, or that he thought he could fly. On the other hand,
"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me."
Here, we probably CAN assume that the poet was in a rural place near evening, and can even further infer that there was some kind of curfew bell or gong wherever he was. (In the event, it was the 8 o'clock curfew bells left from the time of William the Conqueror). This even though he doesn't mean to be talking of curfews, particularly, but to set a mood, using that as an aside.
There's just not a rule -- you have to look at the language and decide.
Anyway.
"The example of this that most readily comes to mind is the doctrine of ensoulment that teaches ensoulment occurs at conception (a doctrine I will only debate with you outside the forums)."
Hahaha. Good call. We can also take this private, if you like, though I'm happy to leave it public too. Anyway, yes. Agreed on that point. But on Psalm 51,
"There are several reasons this verse shouldn't be used for doctrine building." Let us see.
"1) it's poetry, and we dismiss a lot of poetry!"
Well, I certainly do not believe in dismissing poetry, so I reject this reason. (See above: I just believe it has to be interpreted carefully, not dismissed).
"2) the Hebrew literally translates as "from the time my mother was in heat," meaning, before she had intercourse and was just thinking about sex."
You know, it's funny, and kind of lucky from my point of view, that you brought up this psalm. Abge challenged me on exactly this point awhile back, and in particular, told me to find a scholarly article. I looked, and I didn't find one, but I did find the book "Psalm 51: in the Light of Ancient Near Eastern Patternism," by E.R. Dagglish, who was one of the preeminent American Hebrew scholars of the 20th century. It was actually his dissertation at Columbia University. Anyway, I ordered the book on ILL, though I've sadly returned it now. He didn't discuss abortion at all (probably great, from the point of view of this discussion, since that would have raised objectivity issues), but he did do a very exhaustive analysis of the Hebrew text.
The point of all this is that you're wrong -- at least as Dagglish interpreted it, it did mean coition, the beginning of life, and had little or nothing substantive to do with the mother beyond her being the locus of conception.
"3) David is obviously using hyperbole, because he is so distraught over the sin he committed against the Tetragrammaton by inviting Bathsheba for a sleepover."
And that's obviously completely subjective and unsupportable. I can do little but again refer you to the book above, which would disagree, and view the verse as making substantive claims about David's sinfulness to the earliest point of life.
Sorry I can't quote it for you -- I returned it, as I said.
Now, I do think this verse is SOMEWHAT less strong for the abortion point than some would say, simply because there are still two reasonable ways, to my mind, to interpret what he's saying, and only one of them implies the needed point. That said, I also think the usual one is somewhat more natural, and this seems to be agreed on by such as Daiglish, to at least some extent, but anyway. I'm digressing, aren't I? As you can hopefully see, I do think it's completely legitimate to base theology on such verses. You just have to do some work to be careful in interpreting them.
"Despite these three excellent reasons, I have yet to convince a single Christian that they are interpreting poetry wrongly, yet they tell me my understanding of the poetry is worse than theirs!"
Well, I'm afraid I don't find your three reasons compelling, either. Another point worth making is that just because somebody was upset when he wrote something -- that might mean you should take that into account in WHAT HE MEANT, but it won't mean that what he said was false if it made into the Bible. :-)
We largely agree about the passage in Ecc., I'd say.
"And I just read your last paragraph again and see that you agree we agree on reading in context."
I'm glad : )
"it's been a long week, semck. I hope this response pushes our discussion further rather than hinders it. "
And I hope the same. By the way, I hope I don't come off as insulting, or that, if I do, you'll accept this apology. I'm a fairly vigorous arguer (I come from a family of fairly vigorous arguers), and if I think a point is nonsense, I will probably say so. It doesn't mean I think you're stupid, or not saying interesting things, or not worth responding to. If I thought that, I probably wouldn't still be responding.
be quick: a game starts in 5 min
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