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[Sure Breeze]

> but do you hear clearly?

Are you saying an entity with omni powers cannot reach me? Clearly I understand some concepts without issues. You're simply not God so you're limited in your communications - both in actual transmission and how its received. God doesn't have that problem. If it's nature as opposed to some "aware" entity, then that's fine, but that's not the Christian claims.

[jimwalton]

In Romans 1.18ff., Paul writes that people, motivated by sin, suppress the truth, as if truth was there and out in the open, but people choose to put it in a box (or a prison, so to speak), sit on the lid, and hold it down. There are evidences of truth, and evidences of God, but people deny that and continually and deliberately push it away until they can't see it or sense it anymore. Verse 21 says the result is that their thinking becomes "futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." People make a choice. Though there is evidence of God, that evidence is refutable. Though God had revealed himself through more than natural revelation, but also through special revelation, that evidence is also refutable. (When it comes right down to it, all evidence in all of our disciplines is ultimately refutable. People make a choice what to believe.) Paul argues that people had enough evidence to go on as far as not just believing in God but knowing him, but intentionally rebelled and followed a path of their own choice. Because they rejected Truth, their thinking and knowledge became perverted (corrupted and distorted from its original meaning). I guess we would say it became secular: certainly still knowledge and truth, but "futile"—missing pieces that are supposed to be there. They were living in the shadows, only seeing part of the picture. Richard Hays writes, "As great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, we like to think of ourselves as free moral agents, choosing rationally among possible actions. But Scripture unmasks that cheerful illusion and teaches us that we are deeply infected by the tendency to self-deception and are in bondage to sin (Rom. 6.17), which distorts our perceptions, overpowers our will, and renders us incapable of obedience (Rom. 7)."

Romans 1.22: "Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools." For all their smarts, at best they were still only seeing part of the picture. (We know that "fool" in the Bible carries with it a context of the person who doesn't see God in the equation.) The Interpreter's Bible adds: "The man who makes his own thoughts and desires his supreme standard of judgment has in effect abandoned the attempt to know what is the final truth—God’s will and nature—and consequently find himself at last engulfed in mental impotence and confusion. Those who put their trust in human wisdom (and to the Greek type of mind this was and is the highest form of virtue) are misled and end in a morass of folly. Cf. 1 Cor. 1.18-25.
"When man forsakes his true condition, his fate is that he becomes not only ignorant, but ignorant of his own ignorance. He was made to find his perfect freedom in humble dependence upon God; again and again he rebels against his created status, claiming a kind of autonomy that always eludes him, and discovers that his vaunted liberty is only slavery. When he claims a kind of wisdom that he cannot really achieve, he falls into all kind of darkened but pretentious error."

Christianity claims that God is trying desperately to reach you, but you have blinded yourself, hardened your heart, subjected your mind to darkness and futility, and you are unreachable until you start to seek God and allow him to take the blinders off your eyes.

[Sure Breeze]

I read that and think "if you only believe then it will be true" but this is true of anything.

[jimwalton]

It depends on the context. Sometimes we can convince ourselves of things just by thinking positively about them. That is not what is going on here. Sometimes things are true regardless of what we think about them, but we can only begin to see the truth in it if we open our minds to look at it objectively.

[Shazzam]

> I think that every form of communication has its pros and cons, its strengths and weaknesses... And I think, most to the point, that if the word of God had been passed down only orally from generation to generation to the present day, it would get even less respect and credibility than the text we have today.

Are you forgetting your God is supposedly a God or are you purposefully ignoring that he is? God could communicate with everyone simultaneously, he could impart whatever message he wants directly into our brains, any doubts regarding how said message should be interpreted could be instantly assuaged by God. Frankly I am flabbergasted that you think a falliable collection of books with all the flaws associated with them is better than direct infallible communication with God.

> Humans weren't created to be perfect, y'know. Only God is perfect.

And yet in all his mighty perfection he has to rely on a bunch of old books to communicate.

> I'm suggesting that the Bible is a demonstrably reliable document.

In what way? It obviously isn't reliable in the sense that it can be interpreted clearly.

> You seem to have an image of God that is inconsistent with what the Bible tells us, and quite incompatible with our humanness.

Clearly. Here I am thinking God is the almighty creator of everything, yet you want me to think of him as some bumbling fool that can't communicate properly with his very creations.

[jimwalton]

Even our dialogue is an exercise in communication and an apt illustration of the points I'm trying to make. I feel that you have not understood what I was trying to say, on one hand, and are misrepresenting it on another. This is also what people do with the Bible, but I don't feel the miscommunication was from my end, nor do I think it's from God's.

The first misunderstanding you seem to have is what God's omnipotence is all about and how it works. It doesn't mean that God can do anything. God can't lie, he can't act against his nature, he can't do what is self-contradictory, he can't fail to do what he has promised, he can't interfere with the freedom of man, he can't change the past, and he can't do what is logically absurd. It doesn't comprise the deity of God that he doesn't smash thoughts into your brain and force you to think in certain ways.

> And yet in all his mighty perfection he has to rely on a bunch of old books to communicate.

We've already covered this ground, so I presume my clear communication to you was of no particular effect. And yet you seem to blame God for lack of understanding on your part. There are three parts to communication: The messenger, the message, and the receiver. All have to be in play for communication to be effective.

> In what way (that the Bible is demonstrably reliable)? It obviously isn't reliable in the sense that it can be interpreted clearly.

We could page through the Bible one page at a time, and I can show you all the things that have been corroborated historically, geographically, archaeologically, religiously, and culturally. There are corroborated elements on just about every page. The theological interpretations, however, aren't part of the secular historical record, but sometimes their consequences are.

> Here I am thinking God is the almighty creator of everything, yet you want me to think of him as some bumbling fool that can't communicate properly with his very creations.

This statement of yours in disingenuous, because you don't think God is the almighty creator of everything. You've already told me, "I don't believe God exists, so my explanation is pretty simple: God doesn't communicate directly with each of us because he doesn't exist."

[Ring Master]

> Even highly-respected Socrates said, "Words put in writing are incapable of being clear and are only useful to remind someone of what they have heard," and "Written words cannot be defended by argument and cannot teach truth effectively." "Barely literate" doesn't mean stupid.

Isn't this an argument against the use of the bible to relay a message?

[jimwalton]

It shows that each culture prefers its method of communication as "the superior way". Modern critics often say out of one side of their mouth, "The Bible was passed on by oral transmission, and therefore it's unreliable." But then there are also posts like this one that criticizes, "If God really meant to communicate better, he would speak it to us rather than write it down." God loses no matter what. In our day, we generally regard written communication as superior to oral; in ancient days (as Socrates shows), they regarded oral as superior. Rabbinic confidence in memorization was so high that some rabbis even banned the writing of oral traditions (Babylonian Talmud, Temurah 14b). So are just guilty of presentism and ethnocentrism? Are we guilty of condemning God no matter what he does? I happen to think it's pretty spectacular that God communicates with us at all. I happen to be of the opinion that the Bible was a reliable way to transmit God's communication. It involves both oral transmission and the written record, yet for people who are determined to criticize, God is to blame for being the stupid one.

[Sure Breeze]

Why would you need to open a mind to look at something objectively? I can deny the sun exists all I want but it's still there.

Can you go into more detail about the difference between convincing yourself that something is true (when it's not) rather opening your mind? It really feels like self-delusion to me but I can't tell the difference.

[jimwalton]

> Why would you need to open a mind to look at something objectively?

To eliminate bias as much as possible, and to reduce any distortions that might come from one's personal vantage point.

> I can deny the sun exists all I want but it's still there.

I wasn't writing about denial, but about distortion.

> Can you go into more detail about the difference between convincing yourself that something is true (when it's not) rather opening your mind?

I think the political process is an apt example. Democrats work hard to convince themselves that Hillary Clinton is not a criminal who belongs behind bars or that Bernie Sanders isn't going to turn our country into a socialist morass. On the other hand, Republicans are working hard to convince themselves that Donald Trump isn't a big jerk who's going to alienate everybody in the world with his fat mouth and moronic ideas. Instead, democracy has a better chance of being a reasonable civic ideal if people would just forget about their party biases and their self-centered orientation (I'll vote for whoever will help me) and be a little more objective and vote for the person with the most responsible policy ideas who will govern the country and interact with the world most beneficially for all. Yeah, right. The former is self-delusion, the latter is an attempt at finding closer to the ideal with some open-minded objectivity.