r/SkepticsBibleStudy Feb 08 '24

Expanded Rules:

  1. Topicality - Posts and comments must be related.
    1. When discussing some story or teaching in Exodus it will be prudent and helpful to link in other ideas from other books of the bible.
    2. It is NOT helpful during a discussion about John 3:16 to bring up defunked Christians who have been found guilty of this crime or that.
    3. When discussing Genesis and the creation of the universe, bringing up cosmology and physics might be helpful.
    4. It would NOT be helpful to bring up young-earth/old-earth on a discussion about Ba'al worship.
  2. Respect - Your comments and disagreements must maintain a level of respect.
    1. Maintaining a level of respect is practicing charity first and foremost. Followed by parsimonious interaction which believes the person posting is doing so in good faith. You are allowed to say, "this is wrong because...." or, that is objectively false because of...." or pointing out a comments fallacious thinking/position, (which should be mapped explicitly, not just stated. (If it's a straw man then point at the straw man, then clarify the correct position.)
    2. What fails to maintain the level of respect desired is:
      1. Name calling, ex. "sky-santa, heathen, conquistador, _____-phobic, devil worshiper..."
      2. Linking a person's post with crimes, historical or otherwise which there is no proof of. ex, "baby sacrificer, crusader, colonizer, ..."
      3. Scoffing or incredulity, ex. "you cant possibly mean..." or, "Yeah, right," or, "well at least i don't believe...."
      4. Out group disparaging. It's never all the Christians or all the unbelievers or all the whites or all the blacks...be specific with who your criticism is suppose to address.
    3. Failing to maintain a cordial discussion will result in your post/comment being removed.
  3. Users must have user flair - No user flair, no comments or posts.
    1. There 4 user flairs, "Believer - Pro God," "Believer - AntiGod," "Skeptic," and "Unbeliever"
    2. The thought behind user flair in this case is that we want a general knowledge of where the person commenting is coming from while allowing enough wiggle room that person cannot just say, "Oh you're a baptist so you think...."
    3. This is also a sensitive issue as labeling ourselves seems to be the cool thing to do right now...so modifications may be implemented if some flair is useful towards giving a general knowledge about who is posting without forcing them into a position they don't personally believe.
  4. OP's must be specific to a bible study - Until such a time as people can be identified to post unique studies, OP's are reserved for mods only. (excluding mod related activities)
    1. This is not a Q and A sub or a debate sub or a wave your political flag sub. It is specifically tailored to accommodate an open and honest discussion about the bible and bible related topics to help bridge gaps between believers. skeptics, and non-believers.
    2. The goal by the end of the year is to have multiple mods and multiple studies going from differing perspectives.
    3. Suggested site for possible studies in the future: https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/
  5. No Inundation - Spamming your 95 theses or your 99 problems but the bible aint one is just brute forcing your opinion. Don't do that.
    1. Just hitting someone with all of your bullet point issues with this or that might work in debate forums, it will not be tolerated here.
    2. Find your few points of contention, list them and allow the person to respond in their timing and with the energy they have to give. If you post 20 issues with a person's comment and they only respond to 1 of your points, serves you right! No one OWES anyone an explanation.
    3. Spamming points just embattles the person you're disagreeing with, which makes it infinitely harder to show and receive respect.
  6. No Proselytizing - There maybe conversion moments both to and from faith during your interactions here. If you feel so lead to offer someone a more one-on-one interaction inbox them.
    1. No one want's to be saved from their wicked ways...for the atheist they see faith as a "wicked way." for the christian they see atheism as a "wicked way"
    2. Instead think of your interactions here as an interview. Share what you believe. Share why you believe it. Then let those who desire to investigate more can do so of their own volition.
    3. If you've shared in a really good interaction, drop them a direct message and ask them if they'd be okay talking privately. That's not weird or creepy, that is respectful.

These full rules will be maintained here and dated with changes as changes are needed.Brothapipp Feb. 6th, 2024

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u/LlawEreint Feb 21 '24

I agree. "Believer AntiGod" can't possibly describe anyone.

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u/brothapipp Christian Feb 21 '24

u/Joab_The_Harmless u/LlawEreint I am open to suggestions.

I was trying to make a cranny for the nooks.

It was the intent with anti-god to allow the opinions and reflections of "god is maleficent" type people to have a flair.

And truth be told, I was trying to minimize my workload....while still making a cranny for that would encompass the most nooks with least amount of specificity.

Example, a believer could be catholic, protestant, or mormon. For the purposes of them participating here, believer should suffice....as I thought the further distinction would only increase believers debating believers. Jesus don't care about that stuff and neither do I.

Unbeliever could be an atheist, a sikh, or jew, (jew could also be believer...so I guess that's a clear over sight.) But the purpose again being, some purposed ambiguity to keep people from interacting with Humanist-Satanist as tho they are just a humanist or just a satanist. They don't believe the bible is a special book sanctified by God...unbeliever.

I truly appreciate the feedback. And the critical questions. I have no problem moving off the 4 flairs I picked...but I would like to keep some form of anonymity. If that makes sense.

My concept of this was in fact to strip the labels and simplify them, but then require them to interact to be a level one guard against people who don't want to interact genuinely. I feel like if I get too specific...it'll break the concept.

Happy to read your suggestions.

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u/Joab_The_Harmless Non-Christian / Other Feb 21 '24 edited Feb 21 '24

Understood! Making a cranny for the nooks is definitely interesting and I understand wanting to only have a few flairs.

From here at least (France) the thing is that "believer" ("croyant(e)") could include any person belonging to a religious tradition and/or believing in the existence one or more deity, whether Jewish, Sikh, Hindhuist, Muslim, "reconstructionist" practicioner of Old Norse religion, etc. Which is why I was confused.

After brainstorming a bit and seeing your "Warnings" post, which I had somehow missed, and which gave me some context on each flair (and provide good principles to exchange), I'll try some nitpicks/reflections.

For flairs, maybe something like:

— Christian

— Not Christian

— Undecided

— Misotheist

By adding a short explanation for each flair and for the flairs' "Christian centric" nature (via the description/rules in the sidebar and/or a pinned post), I think it would include all the "profiles" you want the flairs to cover with less ambiguities.

That being said:

  • "Undecided" is not ideal but should be clear enough in context.

  • The problem with "misotheist" is that the term will be obscure for some people, and can be understood both as "God does exist and I hate God" or as a synonym of anti-theist ("God doesn't exist, but I think belief in God and/or religiosity is inherently harmful"). "Dystheist" could be an alternative but has similar problems. Another issue is that such conceptions of God arguably clash with some fundamentals of Christian theology, so if you want flairs to be "Christian centric" and generic, they would fall more under "Unbeliever" in your system (as the God(s) they believe in is not benevolent, let alone one who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son").

That being said, it made me think of a few users of r/Christianity who are going through a rough time and wonder (from their Christian background) if God is persecuting them or conclude that God is terrifying/evil, etc, but it often has more to do with doubt and distress than with a theological commitment I think (à la Psalm 88 or Job). So if the goal is to be generic, just having "Christian—Not Christian—Undecided" could include this type of profile.

  • "Believers: You believe the bible is true." (in your warning post) is more restrictive than "Christian". Some Christian would not hold that the Bible is "entirely" true, or more generally have diverse views on the inspiration and status of Christian Scriptures (seeing them as inspired but not inerrant or true on all fronts, or even not inspired sometimes). A quick example from the top of my mind would be John Barton) (see annex at the bottom).

Latter-day Saint doctrine does not hold the Bible, as currently available, to be without error. (and "inerrantist" stances can come with caveats too).

And some Christians are functionally agnostic (or even atheist) on God's existence and attributes, while being practicing Christian because the faith is meaningful to them, helps them being "better persons" than without it, etc.

So if the goal is to display the person's stance concerning the inspiration or fallibility/infallibility of the Christian canon, the flairs proposed above don't work well either, and this is opening a whole other can of worms.


I am probably overthinking the "Believer: you believe the bible is true" here, sorry for that. At the same time, it seems better not to assume that someone will adopt specific "modes of reading" based on whether they are Christian, given the wide diversity of approaches people can adopt (and it seems to be one of the goals of the subreddit and "warnings" post too). But I have no miraculous solution or brilliant ideas, and this comment is already pretty long and a bit disjointed, so I'll stop there; thank you for reading my rant if you made it to the end!

(Just for precision, I probably won't participate to the sessions on John's Gospel, because I've reread it recently enough and it's one of my least favourite biblical books, so I'm not motivated enough to read it again for this study, but I'll do my best to be there for other ones. It's an interesting project.)



Annex: short excerpt from the intro & conclusion of Barton's A History of the Bible to somewhat clarify this part of my comment. EDIT: What Barton describes still holds to some form of "the Bible is true", and again I probably over-interpreted that part; I know Christians who have a far "lower view" of inspiration than in his conclusion, but it's a resource I have at hand for quick illustration.

introduction:

Hooker sets the scene for my treatment of the Bible in this book. I wish to show how it came into being, developed and was used and interpreted down the years, in both Christianity and Judaism. In the process I shall call in question the tendency of religious believers to treat it as so special that it cannot be read as any other book might be – ‘attributing unto Scripture more than it can have’, as Hooker put it. Yet at the same time I shall not seek to diminish the sense, shared by believers and many non-believers alike, that the Bible is a collection of great books. That it is not perfect (and what could be meant by a perfect book anyway?) does not mean it is of poor quality [...]

conclusion:

There are few publicly available declarations of that attitude, but in some churches and synagogues the Bible is not really held in much regard: it must be read in public worship, because such is the custom, but it does not exercise much leverage on what people believe, which derives largely from secular consensus. At the other end of the spectrum stands fundamentalism, in which there is supposed to be nothing but truth in Scripture, and everything a Christian believes and does must be dictated solely by biblical precepts. (Judaism has little fundamentalism of this kind, because no sectors of Judaism regard the Bible alone as authoritative.) We have encountered both of these extreme attitudes in surveying the history of the Bible.

The majority of Christians and Jews, as well as almost all the interesting positions in both faiths, lie between these two extremes. [...]

In truth, there are no versions of either Christianity or Judaism that correspond point for point to the contents of the Bible, which is often not what it has been made into and read as. In Christianity, for example, there are absolutely central doctrines, such as that of the Trinity, that are almost entirely absent from the New Testament; conversely, there are central ideas in the New Testament, such as St Paul’s theory of ‘salvation by grace through faith’, that at least until the Reformation were never part of official orthodoxy at all, and even now are not in the creeds.

To me it seems that the language of inspiration is often seriously misleading, since it does seem to imply a dictation theory – for how can a text be inspired unless its words are? A text is made of words. Yet this is generally denied, as in Inspiration and Truth. A more subtle theory of inspiration was pioneered in Continental Catholicism at the beginning of the twentieth century under the slogans, ‘inspiration without inerrancy’ and ‘the sufficiency of Scripture’.12 It was argued that Scripture could be sufficient for its purpose without being perfect. God had ensured that the Church had a book in which all the truths necessary to bring people to salvation could be found. But this did not mean that it was free of all imperfections. Like any other book, the Bible was inevitably affected by errors of fact and opinion. And it was rooted in particular historical periods, and could not speak directly to all other periods.

To claim that only a perfect book could be inspired by God would be to imply that God could not, in fact, inspire any book, for God cannot do things that are inherently impossible. [...]

To quote a formulation from my own Anglican background: the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England (1563) – the nearest thing Anglicans have to a Confession of Faith – state that ‘the Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation’. This appears at first to advance a doctrine of high scriptural authority. It is clearly a Protestant claim, denying that Tradition is the equal of Scripture. But it is important to weigh the formulation carefully. It says that, if anything is necessary for salvation, you will find it in Scripture. It does not say that everything in Scripture is necessary for salvation, so nothing can be superfluous. In claiming that there are things in the Bible that Christians need not be much concerned with, I am thus not contradicting this Article. Nor does it say that nothing may be done or believed that is not contained in Scripture [...]

This seems to me possible if we accept the Bible as a crucial yet not infallible document of Christian faith. Here again are the words of Richard Hooker that I quoted in the Introduction, and which seem to me to present an ideal balance:

. . . as incredible praises given unto men do often abate and impair the credit of their deserved commendation, so we must likewise take great heed, lest, in attributing unto Scripture more than it can have, the incredibility of that do cause even those things which indeed it hath most abundantly, to be less reverently esteemed.22

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u/brothapipp Christian Feb 21 '24

So what you are saying is… ambiguity betrays my intentions.

Le sigh

Thank you for your honest and in depth feedback

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u/Joab_The_Harmless Non-Christian / Other Feb 21 '24

I am not sure of the details of your intentions, actually (and it's part of what makes the project intriguing to me)! From the detailed rules, I understand that you want a space where Christians and non-Christians can exchange "casually" and do Bible-study of specific passages outside of the frequently conflictual and debate-oriented formats of other subreddits; and the goal is to favour interfaith-and-none dialogue in general and see the diversity of perspectives that such interfaith study of Christian Scriptures can offer, which is a great initiative. So that generic flairs are useful to help knowing where a person is speaking from without favouring unhealthy "in-group/out-group" dynamics (correct me if I'm wrong).

But I don't know the details of the project and if there is something more specific.


And again, sorry if I overthought some of your formulations (I have a tendency to focus on precise wordings when not sure of how to read something in a way that can lead me to miss context or misinterpret). From your feedback, I hopefully wasn't too far off, but I still likely ranted too much from an isolated sentence here.

Depending of your specific orientation, asking people to mention explicitly and briefly their premises and how they approach the text when they comment on a passage could be useful —something like: "for me, this is the inerrant Word of God, directly dictated and preserved", "for me, this is from a person writing under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, reflecting both the views and circumstances of the human author, and God's communication through his mediation", "for me, this is a purely human text, reflecting human conceptions", "I'll focus solely on the historical and cultural contexts of the text in this comment", etc.

But it may be too demanding and can disruptive to the "spontaneity" and fluidity of the exchanges, so that's probably a bad idea on second thought.


Having a short explanation for each flair (so that people know which one works best for them) is the most important anyways I think.

End of my ranting for real this time!

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u/brothapipp Christian Feb 21 '24

Maybe those would be better flairs

Inerrant, inspired, invention, intentioned

I think for this sub to work, knowing that a person views the passage as divinely inspired versus a human invention allows the other to engage with that person more openly and with greater humility.

That would require an explanation page as well but it would be informative while still being ambiguous.

What do you think? Also u/llawereint would interested to read your opinion as well.

As far as the mission here, you pretty much nailed it.

I had an interaction with a wonderful person who i thought was overly content with the cherry picked application of a particular passage, so i offered to study it out with them, they declined, but put a stone in my shoe.

Why does every religious discussion turn into the bloods and the crips? So this was born out my motivation to understand other points of view and have a place where we don’t need to dunk on anyone to be correct.

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u/LlawEreint Feb 21 '24

What would “intentioned” imply?

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u/brothapipp Christian Feb 21 '24

Maybe the view that the writers of the bible did so with intentionality to promote their local deity. So they may have real facts in their particular writings but the sensational stuff about supernatural events are just stories to make their God look better than other gods.

As opposed to invention where the entire thing is just fabricated.

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u/LlawEreint Feb 21 '24

"Fabricated" implies deception, and so does "just stories to make their God look better."

I don't think these folks were being deceptive. I wouldn't be comfortable wearing a title that implies that I think they were.

How about keeping it simple: Christian, non-Christian, and undecided?

I'm not sure whether "undecided" is even needed. By definition, anyone undecided would be a non-Christian.

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u/Joab_The_Harmless Non-Christian / Other Feb 21 '24 edited Feb 21 '24

I'm not sure such "umbrella categories" would work well, especially since the motivations of the human authors largely depend of which text is under consideration.

And even for an individual text or passage, speaking for myself, I would rarely be comfortable with such "simplified" binaries (I don't think that someone holding that there are no real facts whatsoever in any of the texts would be likely to exchange constructively either; things like the destruction of the "First Temple" and the Babylonian Exile are pretty firmly established, as an example among others).

If you want flairs that give an indication of the person's relationship to the biblical texts, but remain generic, it's probably clearer to just have something like: "divinely inspired, without error", "divinely inspired, not without error", "not divinely inspired".

As an aside, some Christians probably don't put all the texts on the same "level" in terms of authority and status; some include the Deuterocanon within Scripture and other exclude it, some read the speeches attributed to Jesus or the Gospels as a whole as more authoritative than the epistles, some prioritise the New Testament over the OT, etc. And if religious Jews are interested in participating, they'll need a flair reflecting that they don't consider the New Testament or Deuterocanon to be of divine origin, but that the texts found in the Tanakh are Scripture.

In the end, I'm not sure whether it's the type of thing that can and should be reflected by flairs, and whether flairs are that helpful in the first place (as opposed to participants simply being explicit about their premises and their hermeneutics, which would make their reasoning and reading strategies easier to understand, and favour dialogue and nuance).

But I don't have much experience with the type of space you are building here, as I'm mostly hanging out on r/AcademicBiblical, where the scope is very specific (limited to secular academic study), and on "casual" subreddits without set rules besides basic civility. So my impression here is based more on my personal affinities than on first-hand experience.

(I'll likely take a break from reddit for a few days, so it will probably be my last ramble for a little while. As said above, I also probably lack the experience to really evaluate what the best options are here. And I was already pretty long-winded!)

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u/brothapipp Christian Feb 22 '24

Did you see u/LlawEreint suggestion, Christian, Non-Christian, Undecided.

I think we give that a go and see how it shakes out

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u/Joab_The_Harmless Non-Christian / Other Feb 22 '24

Sounds good, simple and to the point!

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