‘Liberal’ Christians admit Jesus and the NT authors were mistaken, but in so doing they are trying to pole vault up a steep incline while sliding down the slippery back slope of increasing doubt and skepticism. If the NT isn’t historically accurate about such a key doctrine as the return of Christ, many ask, how could one rely on Scripture's accounts of Jesus rising from the grave, ascending into heaven, etc.
How can the Christian religion be true and accurate about anything else?
After all, the bar of requirements for historical writing has been set very high in the modern age. All things, people think, need to be factually accurate, inerrant to be of real value. So religion, the spiritual, and the transcendent all need to be judged with the measuring tools of science.
A compass of accuracy needs to discern the geometric lines of theology and faith, to eliminate and banish any heresy that deviates from the factual.
What a very high raising of the TRUTH bar for us thinking humans to catapult over!
The nature of truth is a difficult subject bar none (to throw in a word play to lighten this heavy post;-)
The difficulty of hope versus illusion-delusion (false hope) and reason versus despair (false reason) is a very high bar indeed.
Can any hope of the transcendent be found at all?
Millions of humans think not. So they quit 'pole-vaulting' and settle down on the ground of Materialism/Atheism/even Nihilism and Subjectivism/Relativism. Such thinkers include Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Yuval Noah Harari, Sean Carroll, Brian Green, etc.).
In striking contrast, many other thinkers and scientists created the ENLIGHTENMENT/Deism/generic theism, etc. Their new outlook based in reason and the scientific method--Not revelation--managed to clear the bar of required evidence.
All of them strongly hold to modern evidence--evolutionary biological, geological, astronomical, rational--but don't think such evidence proves that Reality is meaningless, subjective, etc. Instead, they think that Reality is ultimately transcendent, moral realism is true, all humans have inherent worth, etc. They state they base their hope in reason and cosmic regularities, Life itself, etc.
In the LIGHT of the True, the Good, the Just, the TRANSCENDENT,
Daniel Wilcox
SIDE NOTE:
on more historic difficulties for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-- 'revealed religions' of doctrinal claims
Another difficult raising of the bar of religious hope came 1,500 years after Jesus, in the time of Galileo and Copernicus.
The Creedal Church claimed supreme understanding and control in all matters. Yet a minority of scientists contradicted the teachings of the Church and, allegedly, the Bible. They claimed to have proved that the sun doesn’t round the earth each day; indeed, the earth is not the center, not the focal point of all creation as Genesis claims.
Soon science increased its evidential findings--our sun is actually only a very minor star, Not the Center of Reality.
Contrary to the Scriptures’ statement, “God made the stars also,” in actuality, those stars are cosmically vast than our puny solar system. We are on an edge of a galaxy, which is one of millions of other galaxies!
So much for the literal understanding of the Jewish Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, and common sense!
Scratch!
Of course, multi-millions choose to twist the plain text in the sacred scriptures. They argue Genesis describes the creation of the sun on the fourth day from the perspective of God’s Spirit at the level of the surface of the planet looking up!
So God looking up from planet earth's surface does make it seem like the sun comes after the earth rather than before. What has happened? A dense, heavy cloud of vapor had hidden the sun during the first 3 days. The sun finally appeared above the earth on the 4th day.
There is a very bad case of Not only 'scratching' but of cheating!
But the verse in Genesis doesn’t speak about the sun appearing from behind fog on the fourth day; on the contrary, it says: “And God said, 'Let there be light in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.' And so it was. And God made the two great lights…” (Genesis 1:14-16)
Other religionist wrote of a dualistic existence, where science concerns itself with the observable and the factual but religion concerns itself with the spiritual and moral. Many theists of the present time manage to make this philosophical leap.
Then the discoveries by Darwin and many other scientists that life proceeds not by a sudden miraculous creation 6,000 years ago, but by a combination of cosmic luck and survival of the fittest over millions and millions of years.
Later in succeeding years, other scientists tabulated their technical findings and showed the earth came about 4 billion years ago, not 6, 000, and the universe has existed at least 16 billion years! This setting of the sacred bar careens outrageously high so that only the most blind, or most compartmentalized, or the most irrationally determined can leap the bottomless chasm up and over the cosmically high bar of hope.
Good grief, what convoluted hypocritical rhetoric!
Multi-millions of human beings have 'scratched'. Been Disqualified.
