Originally posted by PsychoPawn
What is normal about opening any book and believing everything in it by default?
Would you read the koran with the attitude that everything in it is true?
The default shouldn't abject denial, but it also shouldn't be mindless acceptance.
Healthy skepticism about everything is good.
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What is normal about opening any book and believing everything in it by default?
Would you read the koran with the attitude that everything in it is true?
The default shouldn't abject denial, but it also shouldn't be mindless acceptance.
Healthy skepticism about everything is good.
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I find this perculiar: You come to a discussion like this. And someone pipes up that in Matthew chapter 2 it says that Herod had a lot of children under two years old slain, just in case they were the "born king" in his domain.
Then that person will skeptically argue that there is no such secular account of many Jewish children being slain by a king Herod, therefore it is doubtful that it happened. That's a nice piece of "healthy skepticism".
However, I doubt that this person opened up the book of Matthew and started reading through, and then stopped at chapter one and went off to do some historical checking as to whether he should believe the account of Herod's slaughter or not.
It appears to me rather that someone injected doubt and skepticism in some article or website. They come accross rather like they were reading and stumbled in mistrust about this detail and decided that NT could pretty much not be trusted further.
It seems perculiar to me for someone to come across -
"I was reading the New Testament and all of a sudden I got to this place where Herod had some children killed in an attempt to slay Jesus. Well, then I stopped and did some historical research and couldn't verify that. So, you see, I doubt that that story is true. Christians must have made it up."
It does not come off as objective or as "healthy" as they think it sounds.
I wonder if when they were told by their parents that this man and this woman was their mother and father, if they had a default attitude of suspicion that probably that was not so. I mean, Why should they believe that this man and woman are
REALLY their parents?
Better to be skeptical about it.