Should a woman's bodily autonomy be disregarded when it comes to pregnancy?

[1robin]

I guess I'm just confused as to what you mean by "accurate." What could they compare the Bible to in order to judge it's accuracy? Mark was a guide for the rest of the Gospels, as it was written first, so comparing gospel to gospel seems like a worthless endeavor.

That is just a theory and there is so much unique to the other Gospels that they probably all started with earlier texts and oral traditions and added what was unique to their audience and intent.

This is a very complicated issue but I am going to make it as simplistic as I can. There are a few things necessary to have almost certainty as to what the original texts said if you do not have them.

1. Early copies. The bible has more and earlier copies than any other work in ancient history of any kind.
2. Prolific copying. The bible has probably been copied more than any other work in history.
3. Independent textual traditions. IOW no one group maintained a preferred reading.
4. Non controlled copying. If you have an Uthman come along like Islam did and select the texts he liked and burn the rest you cannot know what the original said. The bible was not controlled, text copying exploded all over the place and no one entity controlled the transmission.
5. A bonus is to have early texts disappear only to be discovered hundreds of thousands of years later. Like the dead sea scrolls.
etc......

Even a few of those justifies confidence in a text but all of them plus others I was to lazy to list combine to give almost certainty as to the original.

Add in that 95% of the NT can be found external sources like the writing of the early church fathers alone, plus Paul's reliance on every earlier hymns and creedal statements, etc......

 

[1robin]

The right you have is to remove your hand. You still have this right even if you have to break my hand to exercise it.

What? Not even abortionists assume complete autonomy nor is anyone's autonomy a right inherent to them.

Where did you get any right to do anything?

Even abortionists do not allow the idea of autonomy to grant a woman the right to kill a fetus at all times. They invent arbitrary time spans out of this air (usually as a way to pacify voters) which ends even the illusion of total autonomy.

Sorry I don't get the hand analogy at all.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I'm pretty sure that when Ehrman speaks of "the earliest attainable version of the text", he's talking about a version without additions that have crept into the modern Bible like the long ending of Mark and the Comma Johanneum.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

What? Not even abortionists assume complete autonomy nor is anyone's autonomy a right inherent to them.

Where did you get any right to do anything?

Are you arguing that there are no rights at all?

Even abortionists do not allow the idea of autonomy to grant a woman the right to kill a fetus at all times. They invent arbitrary time spans out of this air (usually as a way to pacify voters) which ends even the illusion of total autonomy.

I agree that prohibiting abortions in the third trimester or after some span of time is fundamentally based on nothing. The right to end the pregnancy should last as long as the pregnancy. The only question later on is whether it should be terminated with an abortion or by inducing a live birth.

Sorry I don't get the hand analogy at all.

That's not news.

 

[JerryL]

The numbers go like this but I am not doing the math again here. There are 400,000 errors in the NT,

Looking at the first two sentences in the OT, the error rate is between 50% and 100%, and the error is in the actual thrust of the text.

The local newspaper is far more accurate.

90% are meaningless, but this is not in a single bible, this is across the entire NT textual manuscript tradition, there are more than 5000 Greek manuscripts alone. You have to determine how many average words and average manuscript text has multiply it by how many there are then divide by the total errors. Even without all the Ethiopian, Coptic, etc.... manuscripts it works out to about 5% error in any single bible and virtually all errors are known and indicated and so are not even problem at all anyway.

I will end here with an Ehrman quote:

This is the person who believes that Jesus believed the son of man would soon arrive, and all present powerful nations would fall and God's kingdom would be established on earth. The twelve disciples would each get a throne alongside the son of man and judge each of the twelve Jewish tribes?

That would seem to be an error of basic fact in the Bible since those events did not come to be. That or you don't agree with this scholar's Biblical interpretation making your appeal to authority disengnuious.

1. Early copies. The bible has more and earlier copies than any other work in ancient history of any kind.

The Bible didn't even exist until Constantine.

The flood of Gilgamesh has earlier copies. The things with the most copies are likely edicts from Rome.

2. Prolific copying. The bible has probably been copied more than any other work in history.

That may actually be true.

3. Independent textual traditions. IOW no one group maintained a preferred reading.

Like Grimm's fairy tales, or the stories of King Arthur.

4. Non controlled copying. If you have an Uthman come along like Islam did and select the texts he liked and burn the rest you cannot know what the original said. The bible was not controlled, text copying exploded all over the place and no one entity controlled the transmission.

Yes. Having someone make sure that changes are not made when copying increases changes ?!?

5. A bonus is to have early texts disappear only to be discovered hundreds of thousands of years later. Like the dead sea scrolls.
etc......

The dead sea scrolls are about 2600 years old. Not "hundreds of thousands". That you would even proffer such a number up speaks poorly of your knoledgebase.

Even a few of those justifies confidence in a text but all of them plus others I was to lazy to list combine to give almost certainty as to the original.

Add in that 95% of the NT can be found external sources like the writing of the early church fathers alone, plus Paul's reliance on every earlier hymns and creedal statements, etc......[/QUOTE]

 

[leibowde84]

Not only does the most prolific and respected modern critic Bart Ehrman admit that but he even says that virtually no error exists in core doctrine, he also admits that almost all errors are meaningless, and you can by software to see for your self.

The numbers go like this but I am not doing the math again here. There are 400,000 errors in the NT, 90% are meaningless, but this is not in a single bible, this is across the entire NT textual manuscript tradition, there are more than 5000 Greek manuscripts alone. You have to determine how many average words and average manuscript text has multiply it by how many there are then divide by the total errors. Even without all the Ethiopian, Coptic, etc.... manuscripts it works out to about 5% error in any single bible and virtually all errors are known and indicated and so are not even problem at all anyway.

I will end here with an Ehrman quote:

Let me quote one scholar

on this:

Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant; in fact most of the

changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or

ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—

slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders

of one sort or another when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives

were as pure as the driven snow. And so we must rest content knowing that getting back

to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached

back to the “original” text. This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely)


related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of


his teaching.

The gentleman that I’m quoting is Bart Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus. [audience laughter]

IMO the most educating source on biblical textual criticism is debates between Dr. James White, and Dr. Bart Ehrman. I have learned more there than everywhere else combined and there are quite a few of them.

You are leaving out the second part of that Ehrman quote. Here is a much better description of his thoughts on Biblical innacuracy:

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

 

[leibowde84]

Not only does the most prolific and respected modern critic Bart Ehrman admit that but he even says that virtually no error exists in core doctrine, he also admits that almost all errors are meaningless, and you can by software to see for your self.

The numbers go like this but I am not doing the math again here. There are 400,000 errors in the NT, 90% are meaningless, but this is not in a single bible, this is across the entire NT textual manuscript tradition, there are more than 5000 Greek manuscripts alone. You have to determine how many average words and average manuscript text has multiply it by how many there are then divide by the total errors. Even without all the Ethiopian, Coptic, etc.... manuscripts it works out to about 5% error in any single bible and virtually all errors are known and indicated and so are not even problem at all anyway.

I will end here with an Ehrman quote:

Let me quote one scholar

on this:

Most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant; in fact most of the

changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or

ideology. Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple—

slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders

of one sort or another when scribes made intentional changes, sometimes their motives

were as pure as the driven snow. And so we must rest content knowing that getting back

to the earliest attainable version is the best we can do, whether or not we have reached

back to the “original” text. This oldest form of the text is no doubt closely (very closely)


related to what the author originally wrote, and so it is the basis for our interpretation of


his teaching.

The gentleman that I’m quoting is Bart Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus. [audience laughter]

IMO the most educating source on biblical textual criticism is debates between Dr. James White, and Dr. Bart Ehrman. I have learned more there than everywhere else combined and there are quite a few of them.

I've read a ton of Ehrman's books, and one thing I can say with absolute certainty is that he in no way feels that the Bible is accurate. And, in the quote you mentioned, he is speaking merely to internal innaccuracies, which in no way speak to the Bible's accuracy with anything other than itself.

 

[1robin]

Looking at the first two sentences in the OT, the error rate is between 50% and 100%, and the error is in the actual thrust of the text.

You are incorrect in any context but your not even on the same page. We are not discussing historical accuracy, we are discussing textual accuracy. This is such a horrific start to a post I am not going to read the rest until I see that you can be corrected with the first mistake because if you cannot there is no point in doing so for the rest of the post. If you can admit the mistake I will respond the rest.

 

[leibowde84]

That is just a theory and there is so much unique to the other Gospels that they probably all started with earlier texts and oral traditions and added what was unique to their audience and intent.

This is a very complicated issue but I am going to make it as simplistic as I can. There are a few things necessary to have almost certainty as to what the original texts said if you do not have them.

1. Early copies. The bible has more and earlier copies than any other work in ancient history of any kind.
2. Prolific copying. The bible has probably been copied more than any other work in history.
3. Independent textual traditions. IOW no one group maintained a preferred reading.
4. Non controlled copying. If you have an Uthman come along like Islam did and select the texts he liked and burn the rest you cannot know what the original said. The bible was not controlled, text copying exploded all over the place and no one entity controlled the transmission.
5. A bonus is to have early texts disappear only to be discovered hundreds of thousands of years later. Like the dead sea scrolls.
etc......

Even a few of those justifies confidence in a text but all of them plus others I was to lazy to list combine to give almost certainty as to the original.

Add in that 95% of the NT can be found external sources like the writing of the early church fathers alone, plus Paul's reliance on every earlier hymns and creedal statements, etc......

I'm going to have to ask you to provide evidence for your points because, for starters, the books of the Bible weren't even chosen until the 4th Century AD (NT).

 

[leibowde84]

You are incorrect in any context but your not even on the same page. We are not discussing historical accuracy, we are discussing textual accuracy. This is such a horrific start to a post I am not going to read the rest until I see that you can be corrected with the first mistake because if you cannot there is no point in doing so for the rest of the post. If you can admit the mistake I will respond the rest.

We aren't discussing textual accuracy!! We are discussing historical accuracy. Where did you get that idea from? We are all surprised that you claim that the Bible is 95% historically accurate, which is certainly not the case.

 

[1robin]

You are leaving out the second part of that Ehrman quote. Here is a much better description of his thoughts on Biblical innacuracy:

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

This is not primarily about textual accuracy. It is about historical accuracy and is far more vague and less emphatic than what I posted. Ehrman is not a historian he is a textual scholar, nor even if what he says is true does it conflict with what I posted. The bible has 750,000 words and there are tens of thousand of manuscripts so even given hundreds of thousand of errors it is still in the mid 90% accurate and since virtually all textual errors are known they do not even matter. I gave you the same numbers he used and I even used the highest end of his own spectrum. Words can be interpreted but numbers do not lie. As I said you can even do this for yourself and see exactly where the errors are with software. There is little debate possible for it's textual integrity. Now if you want to move on to whether it's extremely accurate text is actually true then Ehrman is out and we need a whole new list of scholars and arguments.

 

[Koldo]

I'm good. Nice to meet you too, finally ... haha. No judgment, but can you fill me in on why you feel this way? And, remember, this is only in reference to abortions for the sole reason of convenience.

To put it bluntly: because the fetus/embryo is living as a parasite and it can't live as anything other than a parasite ( of a specific person ).

 

[leibowde84]

This is not primarily about textual accuracy. It is about historical accuracy and is far more vague and less emphatic than what I posted. Ehrman is not a historian he is a textual scholar, nor even if what he says is true does it conflict with what I posted. The bible has 750,000 words and there are tens of thousand of manuscripts so even given hundreds of thousand of errors it is still in the mid 90% accurate and since virtually all textual errors are known they do not even matter. I gave you the same numbers he used and I even used the highest end of his own spectrum. Words can be interpreted but numbers do not lie. As I said you can even do this for yourself and see exactly where the errors are with software. There is little debate possible for it's textual integrity. Now if you want to move on to whether it's extremely accurate text is actually true then Ehrman is out and we need a whole new list of scholars and arguments.

Why does textual accuracy even matter? Historical accuracy is what we are discussing.

 

[leibowde84]

To put it bluntly: because the fetus/embryo is living as a parasite and it can't live as anything other than a parasite ( of a specific person ).

That is the legal argument, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Rights cannot just be dismissed, which is why the choice must always be available. But, that is not what I'm asking. Do you think there is anything troubling about a potential mother choosing to abort a fetus because she wants to keep partying? My argument morally would be that adoption would be the "right" thing to do. But, again, this has absolutely no bearing on the legality aspect.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Do you think there is anything troubling about a potential mother choosing to abort a fetus because she wants to keep partying?

There's less troubling about that than with someone who decides not to donate bone marrow because it would interfere with his drinking, which is perfectly legal.

The really troubling thing here, IMO, is the idea that we should examine people's motives to see whether they really deserve a right they want to exercise.

 

[1robin]

Why does textual accuracy even matter? Historical accuracy is what we are discussing.

I disagree. You said we cannot use the bible for either morality or law because we cannot know what it original said. That is a whole other issue than whether what it says is actually true. It is not see easy to get the simplistic numbers for it's historical accuracy as it is it's textual accuracy but the end result is about the same. It is extraordinarily accurate in an y context.

 

[Koldo]

That is the legal argument, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Rights cannot just be dismissed, which is why the choice must always be available. But, that is not what I'm asking. Do you think there is anything troubling about a potential mother choosing to abort a fetus because she wants to keep partying? My argument morally would be that adoption would be the "right" thing to do. But, again, this has absolutely no bearing on the legality aspect.

You can't put a 8 weeks fetus up for adoption.
Your answer would only apply after the fetus can live outside of the mother, which doesn't happen before 20 weeks.

 

[leibowde84]

There's less troubling about that than with someone who decides not to donate bone marrow because it would interfere with his drinking, which is perfectly legal.

The really troubling thing here, IMO, is the idea that we should examine people's motives to see whether they really deserve a right they want to exercise.

Again, I posed that as a moral question. I am in complete agreement legally. I am only speaking morally, disregarding the aspect of legal rights. I am 100% pro-choice, but the legal aspect has been discussed extensively in this thread already.

 

[leibowde84]

You can't put a 8 weeks fetus up for adoption.
Your answer would only apply after the fetus can live outside of the mother, which doesn't happen before 20 weeks.

Sure, I was saying that the moral (again, not a legal question this time) thing to do would be to have the child and then give it up for adoption.

 

[leibowde84]

I disagree. You said we cannot use the bible for either morality or law because we cannot know what it original said. That is a whole other issue than whether what it says is actually true. It is not see easy to get the simplistic numbers for it's historical accuracy as it is it's textual accuracy but the end result is about the same. It is extraordinarily accurate in an y context.

You still have not identified what you mean by "accurate", assuming that adherence to fact is not the case. Why should we believe anything in the Bible is correct if we find historical innacuracies?