How the World Is Marking the 500th Birthday of Protestantism

[Elok]

There are plenty of instances of God getting angry when the 2nd is broken in the sense of Israelites literally worshiping statues made as representations of foreign deities.  Do you know of any suggestion that God was angry about the decorations in Solomon's Temple, or on the Ark?

[Unorthodox]

I'm still waiting on an answer to whether or not the vatican is condemning my planned Álfablót when pithenge is done.  I promise not to use any saintly remains. 

[Elok]

No, those are still wrong.  They're just clarifying that they aren't made right by chucking St. Alban's left toe in the middle of them.

[Buster's Uncle]

People are idiots, the human race's capacity to pervert ANYthing is infinite, and your weak appeals to authority are in danger of annoying me.  You can do better.

[Elok]

Okay, I've established pretty clearly that the people who wrote the line you're citing did NOT understand it to mean what you're saying it means, as expressed in the only book you accept as an authority here.  But not all parts of the book; parts of the book I cite against your claim are the ones who "got it wrong."  How exactly am I supposed to argue here?  Am I supposed to dig up an alternative translation of that one line in Exodus?  What makes your one particular interpretation of that part "right" and all the other parts "wrong," aside from the fact that the "right" one happens to be the one you were raised in?

EDIT: WHY are the wrong ones wrong?  We never see the slightest hint that God is displeased with them in that respect.  He doesn't say, "hey, Solomon, please remove all those blasphemous decorations from my primary site of worship," does he?  IIRC they're actually straight-up ordered to put those angels on the Ark.  Quick Wiki check: yep, God shows Moses a pattern for the Ark, with decorations, and speaks from between the two cherubim.  Haven't looked up the original verse.

[Unorthodox]

No, those are still wrong.  They're just clarifying that they aren't made right by chucking St. Alban's left toe in the middle of them.

Surely St Christina would be more appropriate.

Possibly St Cyprian. 

[E_T]

I'm still waiting on an answer to whether or not the vatican is condemning my planned Álfablót when pithenge is done.  I promise not to use any saintly remains.

How about some not so saintly remains??

And what if you do use some remains and the personage that they had come from is LATER sainted (I think the term is beatified... ).  What is the status then??

[Unorthodox]

I'm still waiting on an answer to whether or not the vatican is condemning my planned Álfablót when pithenge is done.  I promise not to use any saintly remains.

How about some not so saintly remains??

Oh, I definitely need to make a market for um...anti-saint remains? 

[Elok]

If this were any book other than the Bible, you'd find my argument perfectly cogent.  Say some guy from Renaissance Germany had decided that Plutarch's Lives was really a thinly veiled satire about prominent Greeks of his own time.  Wouldn't you find it kind of odd that nobody in Plutarch's own society seems to have noticed this?  That nobody censored the Lives, or made reference to its satirical nature in any way?  I'm pretty sure you would.  But because this was the Bible, the fact that what strikes you as the obvious interpretation was not obvious to literally anybody who read it at the time is an irrelevant "argument from authority."

This is especially odd given that a lot of the examples I'm giving are FROM THE BIBLE.  Again, you're chopping at that there pillar ...

[Buster's Uncle]

Sure - and the remarks about critical thinking and assessing your sources as well as possible that I've intended to make since Guy Fawkes day last year have gotten even more relevant.  -And that covers the most of it, really; I believe in critical thinking and assessing your sources as well as possible.

Remember, I read that he was the Lord my God and I shalt have no other gods before Him, a very long time ago, and drew my own conclusion that the holy trinity doctrine itself is rank blasphemy against the Lord my God - and they'd killed off all the Arians by 1,500 years ago, save a few Jehovah's Witnesses, and had their way with the scripture record - and if the whole world is wrong, so be it; it's still wrong.

Yer appeal to mob authority don't work on me, man, and ought to be beneath you, of all people.  Groupthink is the opposite of thinking.

[Lorizael]

Part of critical thinking is the self-awareness to realize that most of the time you disagree with everyone else, the likeliest answer is that you're making some sort of cognitive error rather than that everyone else is. Yes, groupthink will sometimes be the answer, but simple probability means it pays to thoroughly investigate your own potential biases and arguments before you take up the alternative hypothesis.

[Buster's Uncle]

I acknowledge your point - but still, mobs are stupid, and people lie to themselves over trivial things and large alike, according to what they want to believe - not least in matters spiritual.

I come, after all, from a church that went stupid-in-the-bag-hard for an unqualified-for-office godless purveyor of greed and hate who never went to church and swore in public, yet they wanted to believe he was Christian, and talked themselves into believing it against clear evidence - and said they believed it out loud ad nauseum right there in church, and voted their unchristlike convictions.  The Pig, one Reagan, is in Hell now, but he had a string of successors.  Obvious bill of goods is obvious, but not if you want badly enough not to see it.

Get it straight: Thomas is my favorite Disciple, and I assert that his faith in Jesus was not weak; his faith in Peter and the rest was; Peter said lots when Jesus was Incarnate to correct him...

[Elok]

You're giving an example where the Southern Baptists were clearly wrong to argue that the Southern Baptists are clearly right, albeit in a very different context.  What makes the opinions of certain Protestants "not groupthink" in this one context, while the opinions of Jews and Christians pre-Islam on the same subject are "groupthink"?  Iconoclastic Protestants have done far, far more than we have to shape the prevailing American culture.  This country was founded by hardcore Protestants, to the point where it was hailed as a miracle of diversity when we finally got around to electing a single obviously impious Catholic to the presidency.  Why does their influence on your way of thinking, even now, years later, when you're not sure you believe in any of it at all, not register as a potential bias?

EDIT: I mean, pardon me, but there's some pretzel-logic going on here.  You're talking about unChristlike convictions even as you assert that the doctrine of the Trinity, strongly supported by Christ's own words in the only records we have of Him, is spurious.  Meanwhile you're at least implying that the older parts of the Bible are more genuine, when from the scholarly POV the reverse is more likely.  There's a much larger distance between their dates of composition and the events they purport to describe than with the relatively young NT, and we know that many of the events in them wildly contradict the archeological evidence--no global Flood, no evidence of Egyptians running a foreign-slave economy, no sign that David and Solomon ruled a big, powerful Jewish Empire.  Issues with the NT are modest by comparison.

[Buster's Uncle]

No no no.  That first paragraph is a bad-faith reading.

[Elok]

No, it isn't.  You're asserting your POV--an interpretive framework you acquired from being raised Southern Baptist--as though it isn't an interpretive framework at all, but "what the Bible says."  But the Bible says a lot of things in a lot of places, and your particular interpretation is based on reading the Second Commandment in one particular way, ignoring both contemporary and following traditions, as well as other parts of the Bible itself, as simply other people refusing to accept what you see as the correct interpretation of the Second.  But, stripped of all context, there's no reason the 2C should be taken to mean, "God doesn't like images of living or angelic beings used in worship in any way."  That's something you inherited from your own tradition.  It could also be taken to mean--the most literal or naive reading--that God doesn't like images of living things in any context, so that the horse my son drew yesterday is sinful.  It could mean that God doesn't want us making images, but we're okay with acquiring them from others, so long as we don't bow down and serve them (the second part).  Or it could mean--bearing in mind the scriptural context, in which God repeatedly gets angry at idol-worshipers--that God specifically does not like literal idolatry, the worship of objects as deities.  If you don't like our tradition, fine, but you don't get to claim yours as the default or obvious position when it's nothing of the sort.  This is what I meant by Sola Scriptura being a shell game.