> The best thing I can say about that is, "some
>interpretive practices are better than others."
>A large part of our seminary training was
>exposing flawed hermeneutical methods (eg.
>argument from silence) and learning valid ones
>(eg. consideration of context and literary
>form). I don't have any qualms about calling
>some interpretations valid and others invalid on
>the basis of the methods used to derive them.
>That still leaves a certain breadth of
>viewpoints, but sticking to "good" interpretive
>practice cuts out a lot of the chaff right from
>the get-go.

I agree that some interpretations are inherintly better than others. I don't really have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is saying you have absolute Truth when all you actually have is a good interpretation of a book.

Besides that, there are many instances of twisted logic that Christians use to justify certain beliefs that are, rather obviously to me, not the correct interpretation or even a *good* interpretation.

For instance, the old question of how did Judas die? Matthew says he hanged himself. Acts says he fell down in a field or something.

We've got two passages that both purport to describe the ultimate end of the same man. Logic alone would say that the simplest answer is that one of the accounts is incorrect. Occam's Razor would point us towards this answer, which is the simplest one to come to. If I ask two people "How did JFK die" and one of them says "He was shot in the head" and the other says "He was stabbed", I must rationally conclude that one of them is mistaken.

But a Christian *can't* come to that conclusion, because he's already working from the assumption that everything in the Bible is factually correct. So he reaches the only conclusion he can reach, which is that BOTH are somehow correct. The most common explanation I've heard is that Judas first hung himself somewhere in the middle of a field, and the rope broke and he fell down and all his guts came out. And for whatever reason, the two accounts don't seem to think it's worth mentioning the other half of the story.

Add to that the other little quaundry in these passages--just who bought the field called "The Field of Blood" and why it was called that? Matthew says the Priests bought it with the money Judas returned, as it was unlawful to put such "blood money" into the treasury. They buried "strangers" in it, and it was called The Field of Blood for this reason.

Acts says that *Judas* bought the field with the money from his treachery, and that it was called The Field of Blood because he fell headlong into it and burst assunder in it's midst.

Again, my interpretation of this is that one account is in error. Either Judas returned the money and hanged himself, and the Priests bought the field and buried people in it, *or* Judas bought the field with the money and he tripped and fell in it or something and died. There really is no other logical conclusion *unless* you're already working from a faith-based assumption that the Bible is inerrant.

These are just simple logical arguments. It doesn't even touch on what I was getting at before, which is more of an interpretation of language and words. To me, religion based on the readings and interpretations of ancient books is functionally equivalent to the school of literary criticism and analysis known as "authorial intention". What authorial intention seeks to discover is what the author of a work meant when he wrote something. Now of course, most religious works are *trying* to convey their meanings clearly, while most fiction writers are trying at least in some way to obscure their meaning. But when you're working from a manuscript that ranges somewhere between 5000 and 1800 years old, and has been re-copied and translated numerous times, you get basically the same effect. In fact, I think it's more clear to most people what Mark Twain "meant" when he wrote Huckleberry Finn than what God "meant" when he wrote parts of the Old Testement.

My point, though, is that try as you might, be as accurate as you can possibly be, you'll never KNOW what Mark Twain really meant by any particular passage in Huck Finn. The same way you'll never really know for certain what some ancient priest, writing in a dead language, working from cultural and societal biases we can sometimes only guess at, meant by parts of the Bible.

And honestly, THIS concept in and of itself doesn't bother me. It's the idea that you can glean Truth-with-a-capital-T from this that bothers me. Because if you think you've found Truth, you necessarily think it's a Truth we at least ought to try to live by, every one of us. And while I'm not saying that I think anyone here is trying to force their beliefs on others, I *do* know that plenty of Christians *do* try to do this, precicely BECAUSE they think they've found Truth. And that bothers the hell out of me. It makes no logical sense to me. I'd sooner listen to UFO crackpots, because at least there's a chance *they* actually saw the thing they're trying to convince me exists.

And anyway, I don't know why I bothered to spend the time to type this out, since I'm sure Sam is just going to delete it before you even get a chance to reply. It's so frustrating sometimes being the voice of the opposing viewpoint. *sigh*

-- Dave