That actually wasn't my point at all. I merely was relating a statement from a book concerning the historical aspect of the Bible. I believe the Bible to be true and Harry Potter to be fiction. Why? One claims to be true. Ok, so I examine those claims, historical evidence and the like. Same thing with other religious texts. That's what I do.

Many of the lessons are abhorrent and it is questionable why they are in the Bible in the first place. I think there is a story in the latter part of Judges that is horrific and I derive no good moral from the story. That, among several other stories.

I get why you dismiss it. I don't agree.
The Book of Mormon and and Quran are internally inconsistent, even in the course of their message. The Book of Mormon is historically questionable.

Of course, the argument is made that the Bible is full of all kinds of contradictions to which the argument is then made regarding context and original languages. That is part of the multi-layered aspect of which I speak and one of the reasons I keep researching and learning.

That's not faith, I'm afraid.

Respectfully, and back to the OP, I disagree. Forgetting the Bible and all other religions, I still would be convinced of a deity of some kind because of the natural world. Evolutionary theory is not satisfactory when it comes to the origins of the universe.

Also, you caught me on the evidence and proof thing. My apologies

Fascinating, to me that transition in your life. However, I happen to know that Tolkien and Lewis spent years debating, discussing and researching different mythologies.  Even Tolkien was disappointed that Lewis ended up a Protestant and not Catholic, as Tolkien was.

Um, but they didn't all know each other, neither where they all contemporaries. The analogy is incomplete and assumes a connection not there in the historical record.

The idea that the Bible was cobbled together by men who conspired to create their view of the world and suppress others is a popular one, especially with the Gnostic gospels coming around. But, many of the stories in the Old Testament have to be viewed in their context, historical and the like, rather than just be taken at face value. In reality, we do this with everything we read, yet the Bible has struggled because of the modern view of it and its interpretation.

I'm sure you've read several books and such by apologists and others, but I'll link it any way. You ask why the Bible is unique versus other books and my summation is the fact that 40 authors over several millennium composted this work, some with differing points of view. Yet, there is a consistent message of man's fall and God work towards redemption. The details in the story are varied, nuanced, some are lost to history or lost in language but there are layers to find in the story of the people who wrote the Bible and the story they tell: http://www.josh.org/resources/study-res … so-specia/

The Bible is also unique in its message. In every other religion, man must do something to obtain to the divine standard, like the Eightfold path, or the four pillars of Islam. Perhaps I should evangelize more to ensure that I am among the 144,000 to go to heaven, like the Jehovah's Witness' that come to my door. Or maybe, I can pay enough to the Church of Scientology to be saved...

In Christianity, God is the actor upon saving man, and man has the opportunity to respond. That really is all. The Bible is the story of man and his struggle to redeem himself and God's work there in. Yes, it is a beautiful myth making exercise, one that has an interesting history. Like I said before, I find that compelling. You may not.

This is not the format that I like this debate. I prefer face to face, over coffee or other beverage. But, it is nice to be challenged, to do research and learn more from others' point of view.

Really won't change anyone's mind but it is interesting.

Thanks for the compliment

Edit: Also, whether Dorkman knows it or not, we have sparred in the past on the tf.n boards over similar topics. However, that was a while ago

Last edited by fireproof78 (2013-11-14 09:13:56)

Just thought I'd jump in here and clarify that evolutionary theory has absolutely nothing to do with the origins of the universe.

In the words of an ancient Chinese proverb: "It ain't even the same fucking sport."

Taking a quick scan of the page fireproof linked to, let me just point to this bit here:

This is not analogous to the development of the Bible. As the page points out in the very next paragraph, the Bible was developed over 1500 years. It was not written simultaneously by ten or forty or however many people who all, in isolation, said the same thing. That would be extraordinarily impressive!

But if I took ten people and asked ONE of them to write on a particular topic, then I gave the second person the first person's essay and asked him to think about it for three months and then write me an essay on the same subject, then gave the third person both the other guys' essays for six months and so on, and by the time I got to the sixth guy we'd been doing this for ten years and I was holding a seminar on the topic using the other five essays as study guides, and when I had all ten I found two essays didn't really come to the same conclusion and threw them out -- well, it's hardly extraordinary at all for me to present you with a collection of eight essays written over several years on the same theme, is it?

And anyway, as you point out, the Bible has plenty of contradictions which makes this apologist's claim of perfect unity, well, not really very true.

Last edited by Dorkman (2013-11-14 09:43:25)

Yeah. It's interesting. But I will definitely admit that it fucked me up hard in high school. There's still some stuff from that time that I'm trying to break myself out of. It's not something that I'd ever wish on anyone, at least the way I did it.

Yes, strictly speaking we should be agnostic about everything - the sun may not rise tomorrow, the chair you're sitting on may collapse underneath you, the tennis ball may quantum tunnel through your racquet (happens to me all the time).

But if the overwhelming weight of evidence supports one proposition and there's no evidence supporting the opposite view (if fact, plenty of evidence that it's fiction), then for practical purposes we can take the philosophical shortcut and revise our agnosticism to outright atheism.

If you still insist 'no, no, you have to be agnostic - there could still be a God', then you need to honest with yourself that you're leaving the door ajar for emotional reasons, not logical ones.

Yes. I also come at movies, politics and other topics with presupposition. My life is presuppositions build upon one each other and I never claimed otherwise. I have admitted my bias but I also know how to do research.

What mechanism do you use to separate truth and what do you define as true?
I truly want a definition for the purpose of this discussion.

Nah, I prefer to remain ignorant

I misused the term evolutionary theory in this debate. Sorry, late night on that one. What I mean to say is that the natural world, studying it, the universe and what we know it, I find a need for a creative being, not necessarily the God of the Bible.

Oh, and God, at least the God I am talking about, does not behave in a satisfactory matter for me either.

I didn't say it should impress you. It just starts my own research from there.
Because, with research, it becomes interesting that this isn't a matter of fan fiction, with people sitting there, crafting stories because they wanted to add to the mythology. Some of the authors are removed from each other or removed from knowledge of YHWH in the sense that they were not raised Jewish, or had access to all the records. With respect to your assertion that it is mere fan fiction fails to take in to account the historical record, and the authors' backgrounds.

Its not that they are writing in a vacuum. It is a matter of what they knew and when they knew it.
By the way, this is the book I was talking about: http://www.amazon.com/What-Biblical-Wri … ey+know+it

I meant that I will not change anyone's mind here on  this forum. I find internet forums the most lacking forum for persuasive arguments, especially on religious or political topics. I'm not saying people can change their belief system as it happens all the time.

I have pointed towards evidence, specifically archeological evidence. That is the evidence with which I use to build my faith. But I don't have all the evidence for everything in the Bible, at least in the historical record. Instead, I look at traditions, languages and context to develop a deeper understanding of what the Bible was to the people who wrote it. I can bring out book upon book upon book that I have read, but that is beside the point, isn't it? Archeological evidence, internal consistency and textual criticism are all valid forms of critiquing historical texts and the Bible meets those. That is where I start, and that is my evidence. And it isn't uniquely MY evidence. I haven't filled these posts with links simply because people can go out there and read National Geographic's article about Israeli's finding archeological evidence for the house of David, or records of the Assyrian victory recorded in the Bible by Sargon, a king believed to be fictional for a while.

All I am saying is approach the Bible as historical text. And there are very specific rules on that. You can apply it to any historical text.

If the Bible can be shown to be reliable in its textual accuracy then it is legitimate exercise to examine its other claims. And, the same thing can be done with the Book of Mormon, Quran, etc. Can be, and has been, done: http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2013/ … the-quran/

As for the God of the Bible, I understand the objections to the Old Testament behaviors of God. Obviously, several cultures were wiped out, arbitrarily and that makes no sense as to why a "loving" God would do that. It goes back to the old story of why does a, supposedly, good God allows evil? I think it comes back to the nature of God and how the reader views God. We cannot divorce our attitude towards God from our own presuppositions of what God is supposed to be.

I have admitted to my bias, and part of it is do to personal experience. In other words, there are personal experiences that influence my belief. So, I really cannot separate that belief from personal experience, so in that regard, I am contradictory, demanding evidence but unable to produce evidence aside from personal experience.

I haven't really gone in to it because it is readily available information nowadays. Like I said, I'm not trying to persuade anyone beyond doing research and learning for themselves.
Multiple links for multiple sources, so apologize for any repetition. Also, some is from archeological sites, and I am trying to provide as broad of a base as I can find as well, but there is some technical speak too.

http://members.bib-arch.org/publication … rticleID=8

http://www.equip.org/articles/biblical- … the-bible/

The two below are regarding the same find:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/3000-year- … gy-debate/
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-E … -the-Bible

http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG … istent.htm

I'll grant that it doesn't prove anything, which wasn't my point. More to the point is that if the history is accurate then you can consider the other claims as well. Yeah, I know, it doesn't prove ALL of the Bible stories are true. I get that. But common themes can produce a bigger picture that gives better understanding of the biblical story as history. If the history is accurate, then I turn to the theology.

I'm curious as to your source that Jews were polytheistic and then turned monotheistic. I'll have to review the books I have for that information. But, given the surrounding cultures were polytheistic, evidence of other gods does shows cultural influences and dynamics reflected in the biblical story.  A quick search dug up this article: http://www.academia.edu/1857268/Monothe … nt_Israel_
Which I am now reading

To start with, Dorkman posted this extremely useful video in the Raiders thread:

There's an incredibly fascinating and illuminating book called The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) that has a whole chapter devoted to polytheism. The most interesting parts of this chapter are when it goes into the Bible's own support for polytheism. Examples:

The Dead Sea Scrolls render Deuteronomy 32:8-9 as

"When Elyon divided the nations,
when he separated the sons of Adam,
he established the borders of the nations
according to the number of the sons of the gods.
Yahweh's portion was His people,
Jacob his allotted inheritance."

Later Hebrew texts of this same passage redact it to read "the sons of Israel" instead of "the sons of God", and "the Most High" instead of "Elyon", because by this time Jewish theology was monotheistic. Elyon was the patriarch god in the Canaanite religion that also included Baal and Asherah, and "the sons of the gods" is used everywhere else in the Bible to refer to deities—not angels, who have their own separate Hebrew word. Yahweh is presented in this passage as a young warrior-god who inherits—not chooses—His people from His father, the patriarch deity Elyon. English translations bowdlerize this, as did the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic text, but fortunately we still have the oldest texts to preserve this bit of religious retconning.

Also, the book of 2 Kings describes the pagan god Kemosh defeating Yahweh's power in battle. When Kemosh's servants sacrifice the king's own son, his wrath comes down upon the Israelites—whom Yahweh said would win the battle—and defeats them.

Last edited by Abbie (2013-11-14 21:23:46)

Defining truth is difficult, as centuries of philosophers will tell you. I suppose truth is whatever objectively is, and what would be whether or not I or anyone believed or knew of it. Some people like math for this. It is always true that if you put two things next to two other things there are always four things in that set, and this was true before humans existed and it is true where no humans will ever exist and it will be true when all the stars are dead. It is also always true that two and two is never five.

The mechanism I use to separate truth from falsehood is evidence. As sellew and avatar described, I am agnostic in the sense that I don't believe it is possible to know anything with 100% certainty. New information could always come to light that will require me to change my understanding of what is true, but at a certain point it is safe to say that, based on evidence or lack thereof, something is almost certainly true or not true, to the extent that we can confidently say something is true until further notice.

It is true, on Earth, that if I hold a heavier-than-air object and release it, it will fall. Every experience I have ever had with gravity indicates that it always works this way, every experience other people report indicates it always works this way. It is possible that one day I will release a heavier-than-air object and it will float into the sky like a helium balloon. But this is so unlikely based on everything we know and have experienced, it's not worth considering until it actually happens.

If someone came and told me this had happened to him, but could not replicate it, it would certainly be possible that he had experienced something completely unlike anything in human experience and that our understanding of gravity was fundamentally flawed, but the much more likely explanation is that he was lying or mistaken, as both of those things happen with humans all the time.

My goal is to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. I can never be sure that I am doing so, but the surest way to approach that goal is to demand a certain threshold of evidence -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the saying goes. If you tell me you had a tuna sandwich for lunch, well lunch and tuna sandwiches are things I know exist and are common, so I can take you at your word. If you tell me you were abducted by aliens and ate a tuna sandwich they gave you while orbiting the rings of Saturn, lots of that is extremely uncommon, and I would probably not believe you unless you could demonstrate that these uncommon events had occurred, and showing me the tuna sandwich would not suffice.

It may really be true that you were abducted etc. But unless you can demonstrate it, I have no way of telling the difference between that story being true and you pulling my leg, and so I would not be justified in believing you.

But there's no "considering" going on. You've already stated that you assume they are true and that you don't care whether or not there's evidence because you just wave your hands and call it faith. You're trying to make it sound like you're approaching it intellectually and you're not. You're shielding what you choose to believe from the same standard of evidence you're applying to the things you do not choose to believe.

And as I've said many times, the fact that the stories mention people or places that existed does not mean the history is accurate. This would be tantamount to someone in the future asserting that the film AVENGERS is historically accurate because we have found evidence that New York City did in fact exist.

To get away from conversations about the Bible, let's talk about this:

To me, having come out of this view of the world (after I was no longer a Christian I still believed there must be a God for exactly this reason), the need for a creative being comes from the basic assumption that the universe had to be the way it is. Obviously to start from "nothing" (not literally nothing, but not the universe as we know it) and get to the universe the way it is now as an ultimate goal, you'd have to have a plan and therefore a planner.

It's hard, especially when brought up religious, to wrap the mind around the idea that the universe had no plan and where we are now was nobody's goal. It's just a thing that happened to turn out this way, and everything in it is a series of things that happened to turn out the way they did. We are looking at the end of a chain of events that we can choose to view as auspicious (and we certainly should, as one of the "things that happened" is us) but were unplanned.

It wasn't completely random, though, due to what we as humans think of as the natural laws. To say that nature requires a creative mind is effectively to say that the natural laws are impossible, to say that 2+2 cannot equal 4 without a mind to make it so, that the force of gravity is unsuitable to the tasks our model of the force of gravity clearly indicates it is quite capable of accomplishing. If a universe with a creative mind behaves identically to a universe without one -- and we are not required to assume a creative mind before we can build an accurate and predictable model of the universe or its interactions (see: physics) -- how can we tell the difference between a universe with a creative mind and one without one?

Heavy on the Hebrew and linguistic side of things but this article discusses the verses in question at length:
http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/v … s_fac_pubs