News-Record.com

after studying the scripture below (*), i conclude that those who have turned themselves away from God, doing all sorts of ungodly acts, is of itself bad enough.....but notice it says they ( in this case Monsignor Anthony Marcaccio ) give hearty approval to those who practice these behaviors. where is God glorified in supporting ( thru your fee to see the movie )God hating movie producers by attending this type of trash which reduces Jesus to no more than a mere mortal. Christians are encouraged to flee from evil, not to it and for the Monsignor to advocate this movie by attending really makes me wonder. although i realize that as long as he does the confessional and the man in the confessional box forgives his sin(s) then he is home free.....funny i thought only God could forgive sin.

(*) Rom 1:32 and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Weighing in on The Da Vinci Code

I'd like to preface this by saying I've read the book but have not yet watched the movie. Also, I've been taught and truly believe that only those who have actually read and/or watched something have any sort of pretense to give an opinion, qualified or not. This is simply intellectual honesty.

I find it both disturbing and a bit ironic-- unless all of this was planned by Dan Brown, which would then illustrate a penchant for money-making schemes on par with any and all Christian churches throughout history, not excluding that former bastion of feudal and economic power, the Catholic Church--that a few out-spoken Christians are now resorting to the same practices that essentially allow Brown the opportunity to ask "What if?" and run with it: the notorious practice of withholding information that might change what is essentially a political system based on ignorance: in other words, the Church. The suppression of information and the quest for "Truth" underlie the entirety Dan Brown's novel. These devices compel the reader through his rather mundane and poorly-written mystery/thriller.

For all of Brown's pretenses to "the Truth," there are some factual instances within the text of his novel. The Bible was created by committee, and that means certain books and testaments were purposefully left out for one reason or another. Many of those left out were either forgotten or "lost," according to one's particular mistrust of those earlier church fathers and their intentions. We now have copies, sadly only in pieces, which give undeniable archaelogical credence to the existence of parallel and, surprise! contradictory testaments of those canonical books that we call the New Testament. This is all fact.

Now, some Christians are clamoring for us to either boycott, "othercott," or simply refuse to acknowledge the presence of something they find personally insulting. While I appreciate everyone's right to his or her opinion, as well the right to express that opinion, these attempts at economic censorship are medieval (as well as futile--the book's already sold 40,000,000 copies!). This is what the Catholic Church did during the Middle Ages, which kept the vast majority of the population completely illiterate and ignorant. Also, in the process they either destroyed or hide information that ran counter to the Gospels displayed in every stained-glass pane in cathedrals across Europe. (Thanks to the Arabs, some of this information wasn't lost!) Needless to say, in an effort to stop a "false" and "heretical" testament--a work of fiction and nothing more--many powerful and educated individuals are trying these same book-burning methods through economic means now, providing one more illustration of the cyclic nature of unlearned history.

What baffles me most is that we haven't learned the parable of Nikos Kazantzakis and his novel. Sadly he was excommunicated for a work which, in my opinion, simply reinforces the Gospels. After emphasizing the human element of Christ, Kazantzakis has the Devil tempt a crucified Jesus with a normal life, marriage, fatherhood, etc. Instead of relenting and giving up, Jesus the Man accepts his burden and ultimately chooses to die, which truly embodies the idea of sacrifice, rather than blindly accepting God's decree that he should die for all of us. Now, if Kazantzakis was booted out of the Greek Orthodox Church for a valid interpretation of the Gospels, what does that bode for a normal Joe like Dan Brown?

I hope that in our day and age this sort of archaic witch-hunt would've stopped, but sadly, those catch-words that fill the pages of Christian history full of blood--heretic, blasphemy, sin--are still used by an ignorant, outspoken few too fearful to ask questions and look for the truth, however relative, themselves.

Nathan Bryant

This reminds me of "The Last Temptation of Christ" from 1988. That was a lost cause as well.

And yet, in the midst of what some call "evil," God has continually moved and worked among the people.

To say that God did not use the aforementioned movie and cannot use "The Da Vinci Code" is to limit an infinite God.

So which is God, finite or infinite? Or, is it the finite minds of we humans that limits the working of the infinite God?

I say it is the latter. Until we realize and acknowledge this, there will be contentions due to the finiteness of the human mind. And so it is!

Shalom

The strident denunciations of this book and movie by many Christians reminds me more of the furor in the Muslim world over "The Satanic Verses." In that book, you have a set of passages in a work of fiction that was judged by some Ayatollahs who would never have dreamed of reading the book themselves to be insulting to Muhammed and Islam, so they called for the death of the author.

In this thread, we've heard from a person quoting a passage from the Bible and saying, in effect, that Dan Brown and all who even think of watching this movie or claim to have enjoyed the story "deserve death."

What this all sounds like to me is a case of deep insecurity and an attempt to mask it with the loudest chest-pounding that can be imagined. And they say we're not at all related to apes... HAH!

"The strident denunciations of this book and movie by many Christians reminds me more of the furor in the Muslim world over 'The Satanic Verses.'"

Hmm....I wonder how many death threats Dan Brown received in response to "The Da Vinci Code", compared to the number Rushdie received for his work.

I think I can anticipate the correct ratio without much thought.

The point is that the reactions have the same origin -- insecurity. The way that insecurity is voiced is less important than the fact that it exists.

I haven't heard how may death threats Brown has received, but I bet you anything it's not zero.

eric,
i can only repeat what you have heard me say in the past.................

" 14 But people who aren't Christians can't understand these truths from God's Spirit. It all sounds foolish to them because only those who have the Spirit can understand what the Spirit means. 15 We who have the Spirit understand these things, but others can't understand us at all. 16 How could they? For, "Who can know what the Lord is thinking?
Who can give him counsel?"* But we can understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ. "

we are priviledged and humbled to know that God loves us enough to provide (SPIRITUAL) understanding.

Buz, if you're going to tell the world things in a secret code that only you and God understand, don't you think that it's your fault that people take things you say the wrong way? I mean, if you say "this person deserves death," but you don't actually mean him to be hunted down and killed, aren't you deliberately confusing people? If someone reads that the Bible says a person is "worthy of death" and decides that he should carry out the sentence, is that a good thing? Just wondering...

eric,
your are incorrect.....the words are in english and available for all to read (bible is translated into many other languages as well), therefore it is not code but rather an understanding which is provided by the Holy Spirit. if you want the understanding, you would need to fulfill the requirement of receiving the Holy Spirit. if you are confused, then it's b/c YOU don't understand and it's not MY place to provide You the understanding, it is MY job to spread the word, the understanding part come from the indwelling Holy Spirit.it actually seems to me that YOU are deliberately trying to confuse others. oh well, gonna take my wife to breakfast, it's her b-day !!

All language is coded. Each of us interprets things we read or hear, even in our native language, much less from translations. Are Christians on this blog claiming that passages in their particular chosen version of a bible (or, more likely, the one their parents or pastors have passed on to them) are "clear" to them in exactly the same meanings, both connotations and definitive denotations, as everyone else who is "spiritually" endowed?

That is such a statistical improbability, given the vast variance in human experience and nuances in individual inference, it is not a credibale claim.

So which of English translation are we using today?

The number of Biblical translations alone spells disaster, not to mention the fact that the Bible has been translated about six or seven different times...the New Testament was translated from the Aramaic we assume Jesus spoke to Greek, from Greek to Latin, and from Latin to various vernacular languages, which, given the ever-changing, ever-evolving nature of languages, have also changed. That, plus the first written testimonies only occured years after Jesus died...the Bible's history is like one gigantic game of telephone.

And having it translated into English? English is the one great shaggy-mutt language of the world. We have over a billion words in English. Think about that.

All of these are simply editorial problems, by the way, ones which don't even consider ulterior/political/economic motives. Or even about straight translation versus translations that try to convey the "spirit" of the text.

Spirit has no business in translations, holy or otherwise.

Nathan

Nathan:

You are conveying a common misunderstanding of how the Bible is translated. The NT is translated directly from Greek manuscripts date from the late 1st century up until the time of the printing press. There are over 5,400 manuscripts or portions of manuscripts (more than any other work of ancient antiquity by far)that scholars use to translate directly from the Greek into the receptor language. Likewise, the OT is translated directly from the Hebrew into the receptor language.

Furthermore, the books of the NT were written withing 30-40 years after the lifetime of Jesus by witnesses of the events or those who interviewed the witnesses. The manuscripts and portions that we have of the NT are much closer than any other work of antiquity. If you are going to call the Bible unreliable, then using your same standards, you can throw out all works of antiquity as unreliable.

For more go to: http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6068

I tend to read mostly from the New American Standard Bible, which is one of the most direct translations available today. I don't rely too much on paraphrased Bible. I would rather do most of the interpretation myself.

" Are Christians on this blog claiming that passages in their particular chosen version of a bible (or, more likely, the one their parents or pastors have passed on to them) are "clear" to them in exactly the same meanings, both connotations and definitive denotations, as everyone else who is "spiritually" endowed? "........................

i don't believe i can answer that question accurately, but i can say with complete conviction that i believe God could do exactly that if He willed it. secondly no one in my family left me their chosen version of the bible, i never saw my parents enter a church much less read a bible. it sounds as if you suffer a Christian stereotype syndrome by making comments like that.

" That is such a statistical improbability, given the vast variance in human experience and nuances in individual inference, it is not a credibale claim. "...................................

herein lies a problem, you deal with logic and statistics based upon human experience, thus it seems you limited your scope of reference. each day you demonstrate much more faith than you might expect. consider this, you can't "see" light but you fully expect "it" to come on when you flip that light switch, just as well as you expect the person sitting next to you to "hear" your invisible words and also you fully expect a 10 lbs. piece of steel to hit your toe when you drop it and this caused by the unseen gravity, so you demonstrate much faith each day in things you cannot see or even begin to convince other of these phenomena's existence. if all we could belive in is what our eye could see, then we would all probably die of asphyxiation for we would find no need to breathe this so called air that we cannot see. why then it is so difficult to imagine that others can have as much faith as you but also extend that faith to believe in an unseen God ? it only takes faith !!

The probablities remain:

* Most people follow fairly closely to the faith they learn in childhood (and the traditions of their locale-were each of us born in India, we would far more likely be Hindus today) and use a version of scripture similar to that they have "inherited"

* The manuscripts from which all that Greek and Aramaic was transferred for printing had already gone through so many hands -- re-"copied" in longhand, with scratches-out, emendations, marginal notes, and the rest, some of which were later included or revised to "fill in" missing parts and, yes, to change the meanings to what particular authorities wanted --- that there is plenty of wiggle-room in the so-called "definitive translation" for outright contradiction, not to mention the sheer inability of every reader to agree 100% on the exact meaning---holy spirits giving guidance or not

* Common-sense acceptance of extremely high probabilties(based on theories rigorously tested for holes: one tries in science to DISprove, not just defend one's hypotheses) and empirical experience of the everyday workings of physics is not the same as metaphysical faith. Gravity is not god. In some places in the universe, there is no gravity. Christians and other theists would say their gods are never non-existent. Thus, there are no conditions opposite in which to prove their existence.

FN,
i gotta give it to ya......you certainly have a way with words...which reminds me of several passages,..........................
" Teach me, and I will hold my tongue: and cause me to understand wherein I have erred. " and "Thou art snared with the words of thy mouth, thou art taken with the words of thy mouth."
for me this fact remains, " I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me "....
imo too much humanist intellect often interferes with one's ability to sometimes accept certain things by faith. i guess sometimes we outsmart ourselves ! i know i've done it to myself more than once.

Freddy:

Are you saying we should throw away the works of Plato, Homer, Tacitus and others because they were recopied through the centuries? Are so saying we can know nothing about ancient history before the invention of the printing press?

If you line up hundreds of copies of a particular test (if you understand the language of the text), do you think that you could figure out spelling errors, transposed letters, additional words, etc.? I think I could, and that's what scholars who do textual transmission do. The Bible I use makes footnotes of any verses or portions of verses that were not in the earliest manuscripts now available. There are not that many, and those that are there don't effect doctrine one bit. I think the scholars doing the transmission of the text display a high degree of intellectual honesty and integrity, which is more than I can say for Dan Brown.

"Are you saying we should throw away the works of Plato, Homer, Tacitus and others because they were recopied through the centuries?"

I'd sort of doubt that. There's no need to go overboard, is there? But let's look at Homer, shall we? Both of the epic poems he wrote down from memory were part history, and an awful lot of mythology. Should we take the Iliad as entire history because it turns out he got some places named correctly in his narratives? If not, why not?

Now, why can't the same reasoning be applied to the Bible? It seems pretty obvious that when we read the books that have ended up on our book shelves after thousands of years of hand-me-downs, we are pretty unlikely to read them the way they were read originally... we have a culture that has evolved quite far away from the Middle East in the Bronze Age.

The point has been made here before that there are many more copies of Biblical writings than other ancient books. That's hardly surprising, is it? For centuries, the religious zealots of Christianity and Islam were busy burning everything that wasn't "holy." It's plain amazing that we have left to us what we do.

"I think the scholars doing the transmission of the text display a high degree of intellectual honesty and integrity, which is more than I can say for Dan Brown."

Yeah, but Dan Brown is an entertainer, and all he did was put a blurb in front of his novel that helped set a tone for the reader. He did nothing more egregious than Michael Crichton when he wrote "The Andromeda Strain." I mean, other than write a thriller that was based in religious terms.

Thank you, I think, for the back-handed compliment, buz. I have no cliam, however, to all-knowing absolute certainty...I humbly strive to apply reason, that's all. Reason is a process, flawed at times from human error, but earnestly trying to seek NON-metaphysical explanations for experience.

We need not throw out Plato or Homer, but that doesn't mean we take any text as a priori "true". Most philosophers argue convincingly against Plato's metaphysics. Homer never wrote anything...because Homer never existed as a single poet/singer.
And I would be perfectly happy to accept all the sundry variations and "best edited/reconstructed" versions of the Christian bible(s) on the same footing as the Iliad and Odyssey.

They are all stories, with some amount of "true" history, lots of myth, as Eric rightly points out, and some excellent (as well as questionable) ethical principles. Even the "laws" set forth for and by the Jews in both Old and New Testament (all the heroes, including Jesus and Paul, are Jews) have validity for study and, in some instances, our own culture and governments have borrowed and built upon them.

fn,
yes it was a back handed compliment. it is apparent that you are a well read individual and your execution of reason is great for actually i consider myself logical and reasonable as well....just seems sad that that your heart is hardened against God and the salvation He offers thru His son Jesus. but alas many are called but few chosen !

Freddy:

I was not arguing as to whether the Bible is true or not. That is an argument for another day. I am simply arguing that we can have a high degree of certainty that what which we have in the Bible today is essentially the same as was written down 2,000 years ago or more by the authors. I am merely dispelling the argument that we don't know what what written down centuries ago, this "translated and retranslated" myth.

My wife and the many children and older folks I have worked and played with/for over the years would be surprised to hear me described as hard-hearted. But I won't plead my own personal case.

However, not finding arguments for god convincing does not automatically mean becoming mean-spirited. I assume there are many examples from the Old Testament of those who you would praise for their loving natures (or brave ones), although they never accepted Jesus as divine. Are there any non-theists, though, you would classify as warm-hearted?

Of course, I have heard the doctrine which states those who don't accept Jesus (now, after the "new covenant") are doomed to damnation no matter how loving and exemplary their lives. I have no problem with Christians believing that. It's your club, after all. Believing what I would technically, logically consider "non-sense" is fine, as long as it doesn't interfere with others' freedoms and safety. Each of us harbors some number of nosequiturs and slightly disabling irrationalities. Some of them even produce helpful emotional attachments!

" My wife and the many children and older folks I have worked and played with/for over the years would be surprised to hear me described as hard-hearted. But I won't plead my own personal case.".....
you played my words, i only said you had hardened your heart "against God". you may well be the most loving, giving and compassionate individaul currently walking the face of the earth and the testimony of your friends would certainly bare that out.which is not the same or synonomous with your relationship to your heart attitude towards God.
actually i know many people who have a heart as big as texas and would give you their last dollar, but they are atheist and according to the one who heads up our club ( you term not mine ), they are lost and doomed. if we could WORK our way into heaven, then there would be just as much pride and arrogance their, as here on earth....so God made a better plan than that of works.

Why is saying prayers to and believing in invisible beings a better plan, exactly? Oh yes, to get into an invisible land in some imaginary time after death. Good plan. Enjoy your club membership.

I personally hope while living this here and now one and only life we know is real, I run into folks who are at least as concerned about ethical "works", as you blithely dismiss them. I would much rather deal with a kind, considerate atheist than an unethical theist.

And when it comes to science, as long as their professional ethics were high, I would trust a rational atheist than an irrational theist doing the thinking.