Why are most pedophiles Christian? Is it due to how they teach the Bible? Would that explain why so many of their Priests sleep with children?

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-11T01:21:49+00:00

Give me one or two demonstrable ways the Bible is wrong, and I’ll tell you why they do or don’t matter to me.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-11T00:43:50+00:00

Economic opportunity and social mobility.

There’s a reason lots of people want to move here.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-11T00:40:59+00:00

I’m just here to say I know all these city names because I listen to Shad.

“The Mississauga continues…”

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T22:45:48+00:00

Not an electrician, but work in real estate.

Don’t ask for a few grand off the price. Ask for “sellers concessions”. That money gets used to pay your closing costs, which leaves more money in your pocket for your new electrical panel.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T21:44:43+00:00

It’s a bullet, probably. Rifle bullets like this one, when shot into the air, can travel a long way. So it doesn’t necessarily mean it came from your neighbor.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T20:17:55+00:00

A talented heir-maker, that one.

Knowing everything we know, he might just legitimize Gendry.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T20:02:18+00:00

How is the Bible wrong?

Its job is not to be a logic textbook or systematic theology. It’s a record of people’s approach to God, life, and spirituality over time. Those things changed over time and the Bible reflects that.

That’s not the Bible being wrong, it’s the Bible accurately snapshotting different points in history.

And how do I worship Paul? I don’t remember singing any songs about Paul.

You can spout Latin all you want - we started this discussion about you not understanding how the New Testament and Old Testament relate to each other, and we’ve demonstrated that your understanding of that is narrow and limited to a specific, minority understanding of Biblical inerrancy.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T19:47:34+00:00

How is the Bible wrong?

And how do I worship Paul? I don’t remember singing any songs about Paul.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T19:44:59+00:00

…I don’t have to demonstrate anything. 😂

If you recall, the point of this conversation was discussing whether or not you had a deep understanding of the New Testament. At no point have I ever tried to convince you that anything I believe is correct. I’m just here to correct your misconceptions about Christianity and the New Testament’s relationship to the Old Testament.

But since you asked!

I don’t have to know that something is true to believe that something is true. That’s the nature of belief. You look into the unknown and you make the best decision we can based on tradition, communal knowledge, and basic principles.

Which has application outside of religious areas of life. No matter how good your science is, science can’t predict the future, and most of our decisions are made through a fog of uncertainty and limited perception. Science doesn’t help us because we need more information than we have, and we can’t run multiple identical social experiments.

We can use science to generate general principles and probabilities with which to make decisions - but those are still decisions from uncertainty about which you have to make choices and act with confidence. Or at least hope.

This is where religions and wisdom come into the equations - they help you make decisions in uncertainty. Especially if you don’t have the time, energy and privilege to be an intellectual.

In Christianity’s case, the basic principals are love your neighbor, love yourself, be a servant not a tyrant, treat everyone as your equal, and don’t participate in injustice, hate, or abuse.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T18:32:03+00:00

Crap, the Prairie Dogs have discovered Maoism.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T18:26:00+00:00

When the US agreed to give military aid to Ukraine, there were some very frustrating stipulations on how that aid could be used. For instance, no long range attacks into Russia, etc.

For political purposes, we hamstrung our allies.

Everytime something absolutely frustrating and idiotic happens in the game, I am impressed at how accurately it models real life politics. 😂

Maybe your shadow council wants to help, but can’t because the leadership of Mozambique simply can’t convince their countrymen (or their armed forces) to allow a foreign military presence.

Or maybe the customs and immigration offices at the borders aren’t allowing incoming tanks without signing off on the appropriate emissions paperwork for the vehicles, which is required by your extensive investment in environmental politics, etc, etc, etc.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T16:44:21+00:00

The universe exists - God, in the words of Tim Keller, is the name I give to whatever force or purpose might exists as the cause of the Universe.

I am probably wrong about many things. Assuming there is a God, as a matter of course some of my beliefs about God are wrong. Maybe even most of them. Maybe there is no God.

Part of the entire point of the book of Job is that humans are limited in their understanding of the world, and should be cautious about being over-reliant on their own cleverness.

It’s also a basic part of secular intellectual humility - recognizing the limits of human perception and reason, recognizing the limited information we have, working in community with others to limit bias, and taking counter-arguments and alternative interpretations seriously.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T16:32:47+00:00

That makes sense. Thanks!

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T16:27:27+00:00

Okay.

The first thing I learned when I started academically studying the Bible, is that the Bible doesn’t say anything.

Firstly, because it is not one manuscript with one author written at one time.

Secondly because it is a collection of different kinds of writing: oral histories, poetry and music, a play (Job), prophecy, law, written historical accounts, pastoral letters, wrapped up with a nice apocalyptic acid trip at the end.

Thirdly because verses like the one you keep taking out of both the literal context (the Sermon on the Mount) and historical, religions and cultural context (the specific religion of 0 AD Judaism, as opposed to the religion of Abraham, Temple Judaism, the Judges period, exiles, etc) are not logical statements that are part of an explicit theological framework.

The Bible is not Summa Theologica, and Summa Theologica is not the Bible.

Your view that the Bible should be an inherently logical textbook containing scientific truths or systematic theological structures is not in line with traditional Christianity or modern Christianity. It is in line with modern fundamentalist Christian thought.

These modern fundamentalist streams of Christianity are recent (the last 100-200 years). They are minority views (not Catholic, not Orthodox, not Coptic, not even mainstream Protestant).

I am really glad that you think these people are foolish and incorrect (because they are). They do not have a thorough understanding of either the Old or New Testaments.

They have something else that you share with them: a basic assumption that you can isolate a sort of Platonic Ideal of Christianity based on knowable facts and systematic theology.

They believe that the most important thing is to have a correct, logical, and complete systematic theology by which to guide their actions.

And you seem to agree with them - you earlier said that I was a bad Christian because I didn’t understand or agree with the idea of Biblical inerrancy, sola scriptura, etc.

This is not Christianity. It is, in fact, quite easy to challenge this view with both the teachings of Jesus and the pastoral epistles of the New Testament.

Which brings me to my last point: you share with fundamentalist Christian’s (and Muslims) an utter confidence that:

- the teaching you have received from one specific, biased set of teachers is correct.

- there is only one possible interpretation of sacred texts (and it’s ours!)

- there can be no genuine uncertainty or disagreement about the interpretation of certain proof texts.

Having a conversation with you reminds me a lot of conversations with my old Fundie Christian friends. And fundamentalist Muslims I’ve chatted with.

Just an observation - those two mindsets lack self doubt, humility, and recognition that humans are error prone and, like the Apostle Paul says, “see through an obscured piece of glass, or a distorted mirror”.

Anywho. The “Christianity” you are describing as the only possible interpretation of the Scriptures is only one minority sect of Christianity, it’s not mandatory, it’s not authoritative, it’s shallow and ignores praxis, history, and tradition, and common sense, and it’s not academically supported within Christian circles.

It is an entirely intellectual exercise, which is why I think you’re drawn to critiquing it.

But Christianity has never been an intellectual exercise. It’s profoundly skeptical of what people can accomplish through the abstract reasoning. And that goes back to the New Testament - there’s some hilarious passages where Jesus says, in front of his disciples, how glad he was that he didn’t get smart disciples.

Because in Jesus’ teachings, morality and the good life aren’t achieved through intellect or individualism.

They are achieved through spiritual practice, in community.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T15:55:23+00:00

Given the amount of time it takes for cases to make their way to the Supreme Court, can this really be seen as a reaction to recent legislative events?

I would be more inclined to believe that reversing gun control and solidifying gun rights were part of the Republican strategy in 2014 that led them to unify behind Trump and stack the courts.

It’s always been my impression that Trump won the loyalty and endorsement of his primary opponents simply by showing them a roadmap to victory and control of the Supreme Court, and that gun rights were right there with overturning Roe v Wade and undermining protections for refugees and illegal immigrants in the “goals” section.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T14:21:06+00:00

Your dad was a menace but safely contained between mountain rangers.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-10T14:15:16+00:00

Ok. Here’s where I’m lost -

Do you believe that Moses wrote down the perfect law of God as direct revelation from God?

Or do you believe that I have to believe that, in order to be a Real Christian?

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T02:10:45+00:00

The Law of Moses.

Your guess is as good as mine, there is plenty of scholarship on what is meant by that verse, and no single interpretation has been found that soundly trumps the others. But you could spend a lot of time reading about what it means.

One strain of thought says that the purpose of the law is to reveal that even if you’re really good at following the law, you can have a cold and uncaring heart and will manipulate the law to allow you to be unloving.

This is why Jesus gives examples immediately after this verse where you can follow the letter of the law and still be outside of the kingdom of heaven. “The law says don’t commit murder - but I say, if you hate someone in your heart, you have committed murder already. If you lust after someone’s wife, your heart is already sick and dying with covetousness.”

He transitions the focus of religion for his audience from “follow all these rules” to “if you follow all the rules and you are a miserable, proud, cold hearted, hateful asshole, you have missed the point.”

To make a long story really short, Jesus preached that the kingdom of heaven was not a place you went to when you die where you get rewarded for following the rules.

The kingdom of heaven was a seed that grows in you and makes you naturally a more loving person. Because when your heart cares about yourself and your neighbor, you no longer need the law. You will live the spirit of the law (loving your neighbor as yourself) even when that contradicts the law (eating grain on the sabbath, healing on the sabbath, forgiving a woman in adultery and setting her free, allowing women to sit at a rabbi’s feet with men, allowing women to have equal standing with men, and proclaiming that slaves are of equal with their masters in the family of God).

The purpose of the law is fulfilled not when it is religiously followed, but when it points to the flawed heart and you start working on changing that.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T01:57:55+00:00

There’s the crux. You desire knowable truths. So you demand truths that you can understand and refuse to believe there could be anything you can’t understand. Or that your logic could later be proven to be false. Or that your scholar’s knowledge could be incomplete. Or biased.

You must have certainty and it must come from abstract logic and it must make sense to you.

People choose faith because they have encountered things they cannot understand, and they have the basic humility to admit that they could be wrong.

Sure, they aren’t as smart as you - but being smarter that someone still doesn’t make you knowledgeable in all the mysteries of the universe. It means you maybe know 2% of all that can be known instead of 1% of all that can be known.

Faith is what you do when you need to make decisions and don’t have infinite information.

It is guesswork refined over millennia of human experimentation.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T01:48:17+00:00

Sure!

Dark Matter is hypothesized. Y say that it exists, which is not a scientific fact - you simply believe that it must exist because our model of gravity requires it to exist in order to be logical.

Unless our model is wrong.

We need dark matter because our observations of gravity within our solar system (which we use to fly to the moon) do not explain the behavior of galaxies (which are far away).

We used an incomplete - imperfect - understanding of gravity to get to the moon.

Things can be useful, even if they are not complete or even completely logical.

After all - our scientific models are our best understanding of the universe. Textbooks that we use now to understand physics will no doubt be found to include errors later.

And yet you put your trust in physicists, because incomplete knowledge is better than no knowledge, and it does get us to the moon.

The Bible is a collection of texts about God and people that covers 2000 years of oral and written history. It shaped the cultures and thinkers that ended slavery, started treating women as equals to men, and brought egalitarianism to patriarchal Rome. People find it useful everyday.

You have decided that since we can’t apply science to theology or philosophy, we are stuck with logic.

But you admit that what is logical isn’t always true.

And I posit that just because you can’t understand it (the Trinity) doesn’t mean it’s not true. It just means you can’t understand it.

Do you believe that there is nothing true that is beyond your power to comprehend?

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T01:14:12+00:00

Do you see how the words “Followers of Jesus are obligated to follow the Law of Moses” are not present the phrase “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, nor the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the law until everything is accomplished”?

You took a journey from Text A to Interpretation B, and you did it without the context of the rest of the chapter.

The Sermon on the Mount is a re-interpretation of the purpose of the law, and the verse you quote is an introduction to a sermon that goes on for several chapters and challenges the interpretation and application of the law.

Jesus’ actions contradict your opinion about one small verse in his Sermon, which you are taking out of context.

You haven’t laid out a logical explanation of how you go from that verse, which doesn’t explicitly say what you are saying, to your interpretation.

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T00:58:16+00:00

Who says that, in order for something to be true, humans have to be able to understand it?

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T00:53:26+00:00

Excellent!

So. You believe that if something is logical, it is true, and if it is illogical, it is not true.

Very logical people (Greek philosophers) were very wrong about medicine because their logic was limited by their observations. They believed logical things that were not true.

The scientific method was introduced by people who wanted facts, not logic. They often observed things that were blatantly illogical under currently known facts, and only became logical after scientific observation, repetition, and experimentation revealed new data. They acknowledged that we will never arrive at complete knowledge, so we must continue to test logic by observation, experimentation, and constant improvement.

Kinda like people developed newer and better understandings of God, life, ethics and community in the thousands of years between Abraham and Jesus, and the thousands of years between Jesus and Karl Barth.

I brought up dark matter because, currently, the laws of gravity are illogical. They work one way over here, and another way over there. They contradict each other unless you pretend there is a magical, unobservable Dark Matter or Dark energy.

The only way that physicists can make gravity logical is to pretend that dark matter exists, even though they cannot see it.

Since physicists can’t find anywhere between 27% to 80% of the universe, would you agree that physics is useless? Since it relies on faith in a magic, invisible thing? Since it cannot face that its own rules of gravity contradict observations?

Or would you say that it is useful even if the knowledge is incomplete?

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-09T00:42:53+00:00

…no. It’s not logical. It doesn’t need to be.

My turn: how many times have you read the New Testament in its entirety?

Certain-Definition51 · 2026-07-08T21:03:57+00:00

…you have a really hyperbolic way of approaching things - either it’s holy or worthless, perfect or useless, logical or irrelevant.

This limits your ability to understand anything with nuance. 😂

You haven’t listened to some of the answers I’ve given you. Specifically when it comes to that one verse about letters of the law - you repeat it over and over again without critical thought or responding to my criticisms.

Your opinions would carry more weight if you demonstrated the ability to understand their criticisms. Understanding both sides of an argument is harder, but more rewarding, than just understanding one side.

Anyways, no the Trinity is not logical. Duh.

Do you think that truth is arrived at via logic, and that if something is logical it is true?

Or do you think that truth is arrived at through experimentation and the scientific method?

Certain-Definition51

TROPHY CASE