Darth Wong wrote:How can you lump "studied the Bible" and "get their doctrine from people who do" together as if they're equivalent?
I
didn't lump them together, the conjunction "or" is usually taken to imply a difference between the two parties being referenced. My point was that the type of people who set store by biblical prophecy predicting the occasion of the second coming like a rapture clock are often the same people who ought to know better, because the bible explicitly says that no such prophecy exists. As for the people who don't know the bible well but still believe this, they're still getting the information from people who should know better, e.g. LaHaye et al. Making your own fundamentally incorrect analysis of something isn't the same thing as receiving it from a gatekeeper like your pastor, but I think it's still a useful criticism of the idea of biblical prophecies, because in both cases there is a stage at which someone who is familiar with the bible is interpreting the bible in a very contradictory way.
The latter kind of Christian is precisely what Tolya is talking about, and happens to be the vast majority of Christians (of all stripes) in my experience. They don't sit down and read the whole Bible, or even large portions of it; instead, they let their pastor tell them what to think and then selectively feed them passages to support those ideas. They're selective sound-bite Christians. They do not know it forwards and backwards; they only know the parts of it which support their opinions (which have in turn been spoon-fed to them).
But we're not talking about the majority of Christians, it's the 20-33% found in the poll, who believe that the second coming is going to happen soon and that "biblical prophecy" predicts when. These people are more likely to belong to hardcore, apocalyptic congregations, and as you remarked it's strange that a majority of Christians believe Young Earth Creationism but a much smaller minority think that Jesus is coming around the corner right now. We're talking about groups that are a fringe even among the religious, and in my experience (which has included going to fundamentalist services that looked like a mental ward, with all the glossolalia, passionate outbursts, and lolling around the aisles) they're also the people who read the bible compulsively, for long periods, every single day, and who have read the entire bible multiple times. I've met people who were conversant chapter-and-verse with the bible, by which I mean you could name a book, chapter, and verse at random and they could repeat the King James Version of it off the top of their heads. Decades of memorization by people who have basically only read two types of books: the bible and books on the bible.
In my retort to Tolya I was reacting to what I see as a too-common knee jerk response to fundamentalist religious views, which is to say that fundies are just altogether ignorant, even of their own religion. I don't agree. The 20-33% of Christians from those polls
are ignorant, deluded, and possibly insane, but to say that they don't know the bible just isn't true. Now, in terms of knowing exactly what the bible says American fundamentalists can give anybody a run for their money, but since they don't recognize biblical criticism and historiography even somebody who's barely read the thing "knows" it better than them... by virtue of knowing that lots of gospels were left on the cutting room floor, that the Pentateuch weren't written by Moses, that Genesis is just a pastiche and distillation of myths common to bronze age fertile crescent cultures, etc. etc. They know the bible very well; it's just that they don't know how to read critically and the ideas in the bible are ignorant, deluded, and possibly insane.
I guess I feel as though imputing theological and/or biblical ignorance to fundies diminishes the bible's responsibility (if a book can have such a thing) for their views. So when I pointed out that they were doublethinking by speculating on biblical prophecy although the bible explicitly says not to do that, and he said, "lol whatever they don't even read the bible", I disagreed.
CaptainChewbacca wrote:I think it's because we have the whole 'None shall know the day or the hour' thing, so a lot of Christians are taught to NOT expect the second coming anytime soon.
It's an ambiguous phrase. Speculatively, it might have been a late introduction to the bible for the specific reason of ambiguity. Christianity could have begun as an apocalypse cult that was eagerly awaiting the imminent return of the messiah, but as the years rolled by, they had to do the mental gymnastics that every cult has to do when the world fails to end. Hence, "we have no idea when Jesus will come back, but it might be tomorrow, so please continue to listen to us."
; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen.
