Back to “religious misrepresentation as lies” – that would be another example of “it’s not lying if you believe it to be true”?

Evangelical worship leaders do the same thing. I have done it often. I simply edit out the parts of the psalm that seem inappropriate to me. Of course there’s nothing dishonest about that unless you profess a ‘higher’ view of inerrancy of the scripture. In that case, you’re saying on the one hand that Paul’s statement’s about women not leading in church cannot be considered culturally unsustainable and irrelevant (because scripture is inerrant) and on the other hand that the psalmist’s prayer of blessing on the ones who would smash the Babylonians’ babies against a rock must be rejected or allagorised out of existence. This is the kind of dishonesty I mean. It is a general religious problem (or possibly a generally ideological problem), but is especially evident in more fundamentalist reasoning (at least in my experience).

Kenneth, I’m quite surprised at your “low views” of science!

Heh. Not really. I’m aware of where the scientific method goes screwy. I’m still damn proud of where it works…

Ooh, another military service example, my father did lie. He wanted to become a “parabat” (paratrooper), but his eyesight wasn’t good enough. So he memorised the chart!

Phrase I learned in the U.S. military: If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.

Michael, at the seminary in Stellenbosch, I attended a talk on the Old Testament, tough to translate the talk’s title correctly, but “have we here a violent God?” Eye opening, important things for pastors/theologians/Christians to learn or know about, and most interesting, a couple of more fundie-leaning audience members taking exception to some of the things perceived to be implied in the talk. With a friend reminding me of it, Karen Armstrong’s “A History of God” certainly got bumped up higher on my reading-priority list.

Psalms-as-violent is an interesting thesis though. I certainly can understand that suggestion when I think about it, many a psalm being quite raw and emotional, written by people in their struggles with some harsh realities in life?

On confessions and creeds: good thoughts on the effects of positive confession. My pastor back home said they started toying around with the idea of a “doubt confession”, presumably as a way to counteract the harms of the creeds we feel we should use, the things we feel pressured to confess we believe. (Thomas Paine: “Infidelity does not consist in believing or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”)

Back to “religious misrepresentation as lies” – that would be another example of “it’s not lying if you believe it to be true”? The important difference between a lie and lying, like the difference between doing evil or enabling/facilitating evil unknowingly, and actually being evil.

Is it a lie to tell your kids, “It’ll be ok, God is in control” when you don’t actually believe it because you are in a crisis of faith that they may not be able to understand as necessary part of a life of faith (according to this religious persuasion)?

It’s not lying if you believe it to be true. It may be incorrect, but it can’t be a lie for me to teach my kids about a God I truly believe in. In fact, if I actually believe in God, then to tell my “credulous” kids that I don’t believe in a God is a lie, and (obviously for me) an immoral lie.

Surely that is the worst lie of all?

Obviously not.

Surely that is the worst lie of all?

or is lying to children sometimes OK, because its for there own good?

Replace “government” with “knowledge acquisition”.

There. All fixed.

Once humans developed language, they had developed the ability to actively and intentionally deceive, lie… something that undermines trust.

You don’t necessarily need language to actively deceive…I’m pretty certain our non-sapiens ancestors would have been pretty creative with deceptive body language etc…

Damn, I see -M- got in before me with this argument…

*Shakes fist*

@Michael

Someone smart once said that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”

It was Sir Winston Churchill.

I might almost substitute “science” for democracy…

Also, the lies, damned lies and statistics quote would be apropos…

Another kind of lie might be called ‘religious misrepresentation’:

I’m reading Erich Zenger’s “A God of Vengeance?”.

Shocking! He quotes an insightful clinical psychologist (named Buggle – hee hee!), saying something to the effect that the Psalms are the most violence-obsessed and immoral text he’s ever read. His examples are convincing.

I wonder if my (and most lay-people’s) impression of the Psalms as the gentle heart of the Old Testament, where we walk like peaceful sheep by the side of a babbling brook, fondly patted on the head by our Savior, isn’t a result of selective misrepresentation by pastors and theologians (or simply our own stupid blindness).

It reminds me of an Islamic teacher who told me that Islam is meant to be a peaceful, (even pacifist) religion. He really believed that. Just like we like to think of the Psalms as gentle pictures of a God who never leaves us instead of a God we use as a weapon to bludgeon our enemies.

I’m pretty happy that two weeks before they were scheduled to go to Angola, they apparently decided they no longer need paratroopers. That left us with interesting stories of training, officer’s training especially – marvellous stories, without the ethical questions of actually fighting in a war.

Other war stories I appreciate are the soul searching ones I heard from my pastor back home… of the kind: “we were fighting the godless, the communists, and yet, there was the ‘enemy’, also clutching a bible close to their heart”. Talking about lies… there’s government propaganda…

(1) The Church synod of 1179 first forbade Jews from living in Christian areas.
(2) Then forbade them from owning land.

This effectively squashed their possibilities of providing for their families.

(3) Then a Church edict of 1179 made it illegal for Christians to practise money lending.

Which accounts for the unfair image of Jews us money-grabbing.

Jews were thus virtually forced into usury. Up until the time of the crusades, they were very successful in commercial banking and merchant trade. Then, with the routes open to the east, the Church did not need the Jews anymore and did nothing to discourage mass killings of Jews by crusaders on their way to the ‘holy land’

- This all according to Szlakmann (1990).