Reply To: Reeling from Christian friend's bigotry

[DrBob]

With respect, you’re doing what a lot of apologists do: playing with words. What do you mean “my faith decided how it chooses to…” And “my faith compiled the whole thing…”

It sounds like you’re casting this “Faith” as an entity. Yet, you use “faith” as if it bolsters your particular set of brliefs, too.

Hello, @Mr.Tag. I’m sorry if this side discussion is hijacking your original thread about your friend. It used to be less worrisome on the TA site because of the message threading. Feel free to tell me to fob off if it’s getting away from what you wanted to discuss.

Anyways, yes, you are right. When I say “my Faith” I mean “my religion”. That’s completely distinct from my faith, as in belief in God. It’s not that theists are playing with words so much as that theology is an academic discipline like any other, and the words have technical meanings or cultural meanings that are different from their common English meaning (much as what a physicist means by “energetic” is something very different from what a mom means when she describes her child as being “energetic”). Catholics in particular tend to refer to the community of believers as “The Church” or “Holy Mother Church”, or “Our Faith”, a sort of entity.

So it was catholic institutional Christianity that compiled the bible from a whole mess of various sources, choosing to include some, leave out others, fiddle with the order, etc. We humans put the book together. Since we put the thing together and even wrote parts, we get to decide what we intended when we did that. We even get to change our minds. For example, we added a bunch of books to the bible in the 1500s.

It’s just a book. A treasured text, a touchstone, the foundation for a common language and way of looking at the world, sure. The “Word of God”, as puzzled out and remembered and written by humans throughout the centuries leading up to our founding, sure. But just a book, and nowhere near the sum of the whole religion.

Why not write a new one? We do all the time. Just go check out Amazon. 😉