Quote:
Originally Posted by Thunderball
Ha! Those were the exact sources I was going to point Cheese towards.
Also... I didn't say they were wrong... I said the way they worded it had a clear undertone of bias against Christianity. There's a difference.
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I know of Karen Armstrong...shes a good writer...and labelled as a "Christian apologist". A Nun who gave up her Catholic ways to become an atheist and now follows no direct path or perhaps Pantheism. She likes to talk about mysticism no matter the religion, and is a stout defender of Islam.
Her thoughts on mysticism:
• There is no objective physical god.
• Understanding of god is unique to every mystic.
• The realization of god comes from some form of subjective introspection.
A fellow of the "Jesus Seminar"...Im sure textcritic would love to take this one on...
Karen Armstrong was a nun in the
Society of the Holy Child Jesus.
She regards herself to be deeply religious but with no denomination. 'Sometimes I call myself a freelance,' she says in her melodious English accent. 'I can't see any one of the great religions as superior to others.
Quotes attributed to Ms Armstrong:
Religion is not a nice thing. It is potentially a very dangerous thing because it involves a heady complex of emotions, desires, yearnings and fears.
Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.
A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thought, a cause separate from its effect, "he" becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who make everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.
-- Karen Armstrong, A History of God, pg. 383
Karen is a great writer who has the ability to put her thoughts into words very forcefully. Is she a biblical scholar or simply an ex-nun?
She has come under crtiticism from many who consider her work as "revisionist", hence the apologist label.
You point out ONE source as the basis for your thoughts, and dont point out any idiosyncrasies or irregularities in the articles I posted?
Biblical Scholarship to me is (scientifically verifiable discoveries about the history, archeology and literature of the Biblical).
It is not simply opinion.