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Originally posted by digitalprimate:

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I do love that even given the chance to pick the things that might consolidate their power in an iron fist, they still let through absolutely every scrap of text necessary to see faith as something that is freeing, not bound by law, that is individual, not bound by institution, and interpretive, not bound by dogma.

Well, you know, it's kinda hard to have a Christianity without Christ actually, you know, doing and saying stuff.

Well, they weren't limited in Gospels, either. And there's always expurgation and just plan changing the text. Drop a few verses here, send out a fatwa papal bull about it.

And I was referring more to the Pauline epistles themselves.

Galatians 4:8-11 for example - "However at that time, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn back again to the weak and worthless mental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again? You observe days and months and seasons and years. I fear for you, that perhaps I have labored over you in vain."

Really, really hard to read that, in any language, look at the Church calendar and decide that, yep, all those feast days make perfect sense.

Really, why did they put in Galatians at all? I mean, what did that give them, at all?

d00d it was Nicea in the 4th century - now *that* was a party!

Well, you make the argument that they picked and chose those things that would support a dictatorial church. If that's the case, the canon as it stands - which I know isn't the exact same as we have now, but even the most vulgar Vulgate text of Galatians is pretty much a speech against a dogmatic, centralized church - is very, very poorly chosen.

Which means that either the lads at Nicea weren't purely our for their own self-interest or the canon was, y'know, inspired. By someone. Probably a rather large someone.

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Which means that either the lads at Nicea weren't purely our for their own self-interest or the canon was, y'know, inspired. By someone. Probably a rather large someone.

You win the internets. I give up.

(actually it was most likely politics - have you ever seen people discuss the content of a text? It usually ends in everybody wins because no one's happy. but I agree with DP - if we're going to say "that's so unlikely it must be 'inspired'!" then we might as well give up.)

That's fine. I'm still just trying to undertsand what goal DG thought the guys at Nicea were attempting to accomplish. Since he was speaking of fundamentalism autocracy at the time, I assumed that he was thinking that Nicea attempted to choose those doctrines that supported fundamentalist autocracy. If that's not the case, then cool.

If that is the case, then where does Galatians fit in? I've read a few books about Nicea, and several of them argue that some of the texts supporting greater dogmatic freedom were included as part of a continuum - you have some texts that seem to support it, some that support it a little less, and work your way up to texts that don't support it much at all. Autocracy through gradualism. I've just never seen Galatians placed within that continuum.

And, honestly, regardless of the reasons behind the choosing of the texts, any fundamentalist would argue that the text was inspired. Personally, I have serious doubts about that. They excised portions of text that seem to me to be in an adequate number of texts, theologically consistent with the rest of Scripture but just not acceptable on political grounds.

Now, those texts still survive to this day and I have a copy of some of them in a ridiculously expensive brown leather book upstairs, so I can't complain, but it's a challenge to my faith. Which is what I was asking DG to do because as much as I enjoying challenging my own faith in my own thoughts, it's far more enjoyable to challenge it with others, and in this case I chose to challenge that faith by making an argument that I wouldn't have had trouble with a few years ago and seeing where things went from there. Obviously, I chose poorly, not only in my argument, but in my attempt to hijack the thread.

If he doesn't want to play, fine, I'm used to it, but it is a role that's hard to replace. I have a rabbi, a Muslim and a secular humanist that I can lean on at times, but no skeptics with an actual background in Christian theology who're willing to deal with me.

So we've gone from the third Presidential debate to debating the Nicean Council's inspiration.

.....I love this place

I don't think the Nicean Council and a presidential debate are all that dissimilar, from what I've heard.

Gah! I should be doing Other Things.

OK, so just to get this Nicea thing straight: I'm not proposing some fallacy of the excluded middle here. Yes, the early fathers wanted to consolidate their power and establish a system to maintain that power. Unless Biblical scholarship has changed radically since I was at university, they way they choose the cannon was part of this process.

But, that doesn't mean I'm maintaining that this was their *only* goal; far from it.

Now, in terms of being a Fundamentalist with a capital "F," I should say two things. One, there are many different types of fundamentalisms with a small "f" in Christianity. Ironically, capital "F" Fundamentalists have historically and until recently taken a stance of disengagement with the political process and "the world." It wasn't until capital "F" Fundamentalism blended with Charismatic/Evangelical/Pentecostal doctrines that you get the twin small "f" fundamentalist abominations of the Prosperity Doctrine and Dominionism. I don't blame Fundamentalists per se for that, but Fundamentalism added a key missing piece: the doctrinal foundation for using parts of the Bible, especially the OT, to suppress the rights of those with whom they disagree.

The second point is related. If one has "serious doubts" about the literal, inerrant accuracy of the Bible, then one is not a capital F Fundamentalist. One may aspire to be, but one is not. One of the things I find most grating about conservative Protestant churches is the mixing of the literal and the inspired. They will in one breath tell you that God created the universe in seven days, just like the Bible said, then in the next tell you the Holy Spirit sent them a vision telling them this or that verse really means something at odds with what any reasonable person would assume is the literal meaning of that verse.

And, to pull this all back to the debates, the pervasiveness of that kind of thinking and it's acceptance as a basis for public policy led to the the administration's famous dismissal of the "reality based community:"

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That conservatives, both Christians and politicians, have adapted and adopted the same Postmodern stance they so derided throughout the 1960s and 1970s as "moral relativism" is perhaps the ultimate irony.

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Originally posted by digitalprimate:
OK, so just to get this Nicea thing straight: I'm not proposing some fallacy of the excluded middle here. Yes, the early fathers wanted to consolidate their power and establish a system to maintain that power. Unless Biblical scholarship has changed radically since I was at university, they way they choose the cannon was part of this process.

But, that doesn't mean I'm maintaining that this was their *only* goal; far from it.

Sounds like the place of Galatians in all this is something I'll need to research on my own, which is fine. I've been putting it off for years, honestly, and should've got to it sooner. Life intervenes, as usual.

I apologize if what I wrote came off as screed or nastiness. It wasn't intended as such but I can clearly see how I was an asshat and wether that's because I'm actually an ass or merely inarticulate is sort of beside the point. You seem to have quite a reasonable position, and one that I think I'm closer to, philosophically, than I'd originally allowed for.

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The second point is related. If one has "serious doubts" about the literal, inerrant accuracy of the Bible, then one is not a capital F Fundamentalist. One may aspire to be, but one is not.

Definitely not a capital F Fundamentalist. Really, without meaning to I seem to defy categorization in a lot of things, including my religion. I'm definitely a Christian and i don't have much truck with ecumenicalism (is that the word?), but I simply can't see the Bible as utterly inerrant and perfect when just on the math it's wrong. Tally up the armies in Kings versus the same battle in Chronicles and they're off by myriads, and that's just for starters. That said, I don't see any of the contradictions and historical errors as fatal flaws. At one time I did, and that was a rocky time for me, but oddly enough it was the rabbi I mentioned previously who was most helpful in helping me regain my faith.

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One of the things I find most grating about conservative Protestant churches is the mixing of the literal and the inspired. They will in one breath tell you that God created the universe in seven days, just like the Bible said, then in the next tell you the Holy Spirit sent them a vision telling them this or that verse really means something at odds with what any reasonable person would assume is the literal meaning of that verse.

And then you couple that with their tendency to quote the OT only when it suits them, making a patchwork suit of pieces of their favourite covenants.

My imaginary friend is a horse.

*nods reassuringly*

Mine's a Roman! He doesn't have a name so I call him Marcus and his tunic had blue around the edges and he has brown hair and he's about 12 and...

...you were joking, weren't you?

Well... so was I!

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I apologize if what I wrote came off as screed or nastiness.

Not at all, especially given my propensity for profanity and rhetorical pyrotechnics. Compared to me, you are the definition of civilized debate

And I'm afraid I can't help you with Galatians; my experience in NT exegesis per se is limited (I mostly did the Pentateuch). The one suggestion I would make would be to look into the aforementioned neo-Platonic influences in the Pauline epistles. That verse in particular smacks of it. I'll see if I can dig out any of my ancient books on it and make a recommendation...um, assuming they are not in a box in the Basement of Danger.

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Originally posted by Mean Old Man:
My imaginary friend is a horse.

Your imaginary friend thinks he's a horse.

(He also thinks he's running for President and soliciting a wife, just so's you know.)

My imaginary friend was Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe.

DG, thanks, if you can find any references that'd be handy. I can request loans from as far as Boston if I need to, so don't worry about obscurity.

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Originally posted by Dweller in Darrkness:
My imaginary friend was Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe.

DG, thanks, if you can find any references that'd be handy. I can request loans from as far as Boston if I need to, so don't worry about obscurity.

Your imaginary friend could probably beat up my imaginary friend.
My imaginary friend was in danger of suffering grievous injury if accidentally sat on by my father, (who was quite careless about chairs that were already occupied by invisible persons).

er... mine was the little girl who lived in the mirror. When mum would yell at me I would go an cry and commiserate with her and my mum would listen in and giggle hysterically because, well, I was so pathetic.

Just for the record: I lost my virginity to my imaginary friend.

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Originally posted by Hive:

Your imaginary friend thinks he's a horse.

 Missus!  Read my FAQ. Please.  And PLAY ALONG.

*cringes*

Why is there not an imaginary friend thread?