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From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: [OT] Charlie Kirk assassinated
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2025 18:49:53 -0000 (UTC)
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BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

[about Charlie Kirk's extemporaneous debates with college kids]

>Turning Point posts his appearances from start to finish. They don't 'cherry
>pick' only the arguments he wins. The fact is, other than the instances where
>the topic involved religious principles and he argued from authority (the
>Bible), which is a matter of unprovable faith, he won every time.

Don't make me defend Christianity and the Christian Bible here!

I have heard scholars make numerous arguments using the Bible as
authority who themselves aren't Christians or don't believe in ghod.

There is no shortage of atheists among Jews who can make well-informed
arguments about the Bible. Furthermore, for Biblical historians and
anthropologists, that's not the study of trying to prove Christianity is
the one true religion but the life and times of humans during Biblical
times and the extent to which the Bible has described a historical
event.

Several years ago, I checked out a pile of books from the library
written by one author (which my mother saw and I had to assure her I
wasn't converting) who went back to the original texts and did his own
translations. So much of the difference in Christian denominations is
the quality of the translation being interpretted, or ignoring Jesus's
actual words preaching tolerance and understanding, and instead reading
them as re-interpreted by Paul, who wasn't the least bit tolerant,

Here's an example that should be familiar to all. We all know the Adam's
Rib version of the story of the creation of Man in the Garden of Edent,
but we've forgotten that it's from a later chapter in the Book of
Genesis. In an earlier chapter, God created man and woman at the same
time. Like everything else, centuries of religious teachings of female
inferiority to male is from finding what you are looking for in the
Bible, ignoring everything else.

So, no, making an argument using the Bible as authority isn't about
faith. Too often, the appeal to authority comes from getting the
audience to believe a charlatan. Your traditional Revival meeting? Those
were con men raising monies. They weten't religious scholars. It's not
about faith in God but faith in the preacher.

It's perfectly legitimate to argue about what Christianity teaches from
the Bible, but to do so, you have to have studied the Bible, come to an
understanding about how different faiths teach and what they don't
teach, that there is plenty of disagreement over the meaning of specific
passages, and that plenty of Biblical myths have entirely lost the
Bible's meaning.

Everybody just knows the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and how it's the
basis for condemning various sexual practices. For one thing, five
cities were mentioned in that chapter, not just two. Several of the
practices were mentioned in another city. It's generally a story of
observing what was happening after which there was destruction. It's not
necessarily the reason! The Jewish interpretation is lack of
hospitality, but if I recall, for two f the cities destroyed, the Bible
doesn't even list anything that might be interpretted as Thou Shalt
Nots. And there's no lesbianism mentioned at all here.

I don't know how scholarly Kirk was with regard to the Bible.

We do know plenty of people who have killed others in the name of God
utterly lacking a religious understanding.

fwiw, the massive amount of crap in Leviticus and Deuteronomy that in
some cases argue for murder was thrown out immediately by the Jewish
rabbis who wrote the Talmud, if not earlier.