False. It is important to realize that recorded Egyptian history begins about 3000 BC.
The biblical chronology puts the flood at 2345 BC, so again, my point is made. The tombs dated from the time of the flood have no evidence of flooding either.
Quote:
A number of Babylonian documents have been discovered which describe the same flood.
The Sumerian King List, for example, lists kings who reigned for long periods of time. Then a great flood came. Following the flood, Sumerian kings ruled for much shorter periods of time. This is the same pattern found in the Bible. Men had long life spans before the flood and shorter life spans after the flood. The 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic speaks of an ark, animals taken on the ark, birds sent out during the course of the flood, the ark landing on a mountain, and a sacrifice offered after the ark landed.
The epic of Gilgamesh is a myth. The flood was said to have occured in the early dynastic period. Here is a sample of the history from this period:
"The main part of the third millennium, now called the Early Dynastic period, saw the gradual development of Sumerian civilization, based on numerous city states. From the Early Dynastic period comes the earliest Sumerian literature, including the epic poetry about Gilgamesh. The Sumerians lived in a complex, unpredictable and frequently hostile environment. They had to contend with floods, droughts, storms, dust, heat, disease and death. They strove to uncover order and organization in the world to overcome feelings of futility and powerlessness. "
No mention of a global flood, and no mention of something as important as humanity being wiped out.
Quote:
That aside, there are many references from a broad spectrum of ancient civilizations that testify to a Worldwide Flood. And while this doesn't "prove" that there was a worldwide flood, it does add (significant) weight to the Biblical account in Genesis of just such an event.
There are more differences in the flood myths than similarities by virtue of the fact that the myth is reinvented by every culture. But people also independently came up with the ideas that disease is caused by demons and that dragons existed, just like people all over the world claim to have seen aliens & UFOs. Whatever myths people independently created in ancient history do not give any extra weight to anything or mean anything.
Quote:
indicates they were derived from the same origin (the Bible's record)
The flood of Gilgamesh was written before 2000 B.C, and Genesis was written in 400 BC, so I fail to see how it's other religions that are doing the plagiarizing. You need to start considering the fact that your religion has some serious elements of plagiarism, like that Jesus is basically a copy of Mithra.
Quote:
2. I doubt the presumed(or expected) findings of the `Greenland` ice cores offer any certainty or credibility to the point of it being 100%(that it alone could suffice as full validation). Even still, here is something to consider:
In the late 60's and early 70's:
"Two American oceanographic vessels pulled from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico several long, slender cores of sediment. Included in them were the shells of tiny one-celled planktonic organisms called foraminifera. While living on the surface, these organisms lock into their shells a chemical record of the temperature and salinity of the water. When they reproduce, the shells are discarded and drop to the bottom. A cross-section of that bottom ... carries a record of climates that may go back more than 100 million years. Every inch of core may represent as much as 1000 years of the earth's past." Emphasis Added
"The cores were analyzed in two separate investigations, by Cesare Emiliani of the University of Miami, and James Kennett of the University of Rhode Island and Nicholas Shackleton of Cambridge University. Both analyses indicated a dramatic change in salinity, providing compelling evidence of a vast flood of fresh water into the Gulf of Mexico. Using radiocarbon, geochemist Jerry Stripp of the University of Miami dated the flood at about 11,600 years ago." To Emiliani, all the questions and arguments are minor beside the single fact that a vast amount of fresh melt water poured into the Gulf of Mexico. 'We know this,' he says, 'because the oxygen isotope ratios of the foraminifera shells show a marked temporary decrease in the salinity of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It clearly shows that there was a major period of flooding from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago... There was no question that there was a flood and there is no question that it was a universal flood. Emphasis Added
"Emiliani's findings are corroborated by geologists Kennett and Shackleton, who concluded that there was a 'massive inpouring of glacial melt water into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River system. At the time of maximum inpouring of this water, surface salinities were... reduced by about ten percent."
Couple things:
1) This proves that there was a flood in the Gulf of Mexico, not the entire planet. If you want to prove a global flood, it has to be in all the ice cores, and it's not in the Greenland ice cores.
2) Noah's flood was not 10000 years ago, therefore this can all be dismissed right off the bat.
3) I find it funny that you dismissed my sources as "biased", even though I haven't seen you get your info from anywhere else besides creationist websites. Here is the one that you copy/pasted your latest info from: http://www.earthage.org/floodevidences/more_flood_evidences.htm
Aside from the fact that the info comes from a Reader's Digest article (not the most prestigious of scientific journals), it's the front page of the site that bothers me the most. Seriously. Here is their understanding of evolution:
Quote:
Your Great, Great, 1000th Great Grandfather
was a Jellyfish ... that ...
(over millions and millions of years) ...
might have (just) evolved from ...
say, an Amoeba ...
that resulted from a lightning bolt ...
that struck a primordial slime-pool ...
with just the right mixture on chemicals ...
or
Quote:
Hello, Is Anybody Home? Cause Mother Earth may Not be "Billions of Years" Old: after All
facepalm
Quote:
3. Such a broad statement makes you lose some credibility for a plethora of reasons.
I fail to see why. Theists make factual statement about physical reality and so far they're the only ones that can't seem to move on after their theories are discredited. When people deny core scientific frameworks like evolution, it starts to become a problem.
Quote:
To conclude. There are vast amounts of data scientific or otherwise that can be used to advocate a global flood or not.
That's because the ancient world had plenty of floods, some of them serious ones at that. Theists misrepresent whatever evidence they can find for any flood because they don't actually care about geology & science. The only time theists care about science is when they're trying to find proof for their already pre-determined conclusions. Obviously not all theists, but still.
Quote:
Women aren`t any more innocent than men. Back in the ancient world, and even now. Age also makes little difference for the person
Just give it a rest dude. I've heard every excuse for genocide imaginable by now.
Quote:
Anyway, for Sodom and Gomorrah, there were none righteous. Except Lot and his family.
Then Abraham said, "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten(righteous) can be found there?" God answered, "For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.".
There`s your answer. Nothing more I can say or justify.
That's fantastic, but we're not talking about Sodom & Gomorrah, so it's not a very good answer.
Quote:
Sigh. This is one of the reasons, but not the main reason(I see my last post was written in vain).
I...never said it was the main reason. In fact I said "justifications", as in, plural. But thanks for conceding the point I guess? <_<
Quote:
Also, no where does God command rape. If you make one more ill-educated assumption like this, I will conclude our dialogue finished because I have no time for discourse with a person that is emotionally biased and has blinders on. Such interaction does nothing for me.
I used to be a Christian, and it's not difficult to cherrypick the meaning or translation to justify pretty much any passage you want. I won't be making any more assumptions about the bible because Tolkfan was pretty much right, debating this book is like debating batman vs. superman. It seems that you've already made up your mind that the bible "is the most perfect & historically accurate book ever" so there's nothing else to discuss. But at least I can learn some more about geology.
Quote:
"Ah yea but cavemen invented the bible and God to Justify those events". No, I can quite certainly say the bible is the inspired and written word of God and not an invention of man. Not because the `bible` says so, but because of my faith in the evidence that proves the contrary. I also would expect that you do not believe simply because an `atheist` says or assumes so, that you would also test any such claims. Though that might be wishful thinking on my part.
Christians: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Jews: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Sikhs: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Hindus: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Muslims: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Sea originating fossils have been found at high altitudes of every continent.
Right, and that's because the Earth is not 6000 years old. High altitudes are from tectonic plates moving which causes Earth's crust to rise. That's why when you look at rock strata you look at the rock type, not the location. Radiometric dating has also confirmed this independently. Whoever wrote this must have failed middle-school geology class.
Quote:
The oldest known living trees, Bristlecone Pines in California, are about 5000 years old. This would coincide with the recovery of the earth after the flood.
The Origin of Civilization appeared near the resting place of the Ark at about the same time that the flood occurred.
This is just dumb. There are plenty of artifacts from civilizations older than 5000 BC, plenty of which are nowhere near the ark, like China.
Quote:
Geologist classify rock formations by the type of rock they contain. A layer of the same type of rock is called a stratum. Many scientist believe that certain types of stratum originated in certain time periods such as the Eocene, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of time. There are many places on the earth where the order of these strata in reversed. Examples of this are the Matterhorn and Mythen peaks in the Alps. The order of the strata has been completely reversed in respect to the earth around it. Though many explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, the catastrophic effects of a flood as described in the Bible is still the best explanation.
Again, see a middle-school geology textbook & plate tectonics. The same rock strata also prove that no such flood existed and that the Earth existed for millions of years prior to this event.
Quote:
Sedimentary deposits cover large parts of the earth. These are the type of deposits that result from movement of water.
If there was really a global flood it would be on all of the earth, not just most of it. Of course the Earth will largely have sedimentary deposits. What do you expect when 75% of the Earth is covered in water, knowing that land moves, and seabeds rise? North America was underwater 500 million years ago, so what?
Quote:
An analysis of 30,000 radiocarbon dating results published in the "Radiocarbon" journal shows an unmistakable spike in the death of living things about 5,000 years ago.
Cannot find such a journal, so I can only assume it's as imaginary as this flood. But even if it's true it doesn't mean anything because it's not one of the main mass-extinctions. And I find it funny how creationists are willing to use carbon-dating for this, but not when it comes to the age of the earth or the shroud of Turin. Talk about double-standards.
Your second link discusses the vapor canopy model which is soundly rebutted in my link. There is no record of any flood from the Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations which existed at the time. The geological record & the ice cores disprove the global flood. Period. The debate has been over. The rest of the world is simply waiting on theists to catch up.
Quote:
Then the LORD said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great
and their sin so grievous"
Genesis 13:13 Now the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly
against the LORD.
Hitler on the Jews:
“...the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear."
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
"As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you."
Go around doing whatever the hell you want to other civilizations? Sounds alot like Hitler's & Stalin's philosophy to me.
Quote:
Yea, I totally believe you , as you are an expert on the bible and your
information comes from 100% credible and neutral sources. Yep.
You disagree that the bible has genocide, rape & violence? The justifications for genocide I'm talking about are the ones that you're giving me. How do I know these same justifications of "they were evil and deserved to die" weren't invented by the writers much like your so-called prophecies weren't invented after-the-fact? Again, this reads like an account of bronze-age troglodytes, not one from the creator of the universe.
Quote:
But let me guess, you`ll condone wicked male gangbangers and condemn God
How long are you going to keep repeating this tired old strawman? It's not the "gangbangers" I'm defending. I condemn the killing of women, children & the elderly, which goes along with genocide. I also condemn the fact that God forced people to kill, and punished them if they wouldn't. Forcing someone else to kill is the stuff of psycho-torturers in horror movies, not a benevolent creator.
What's ironic though is that one of your previous justifications for killing the Canaanites was so that their bad morals would not "rub off" on the Israelites.
"You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices."
So, in an effort to prevent the Israelites from turning into rapists & murderers, God forces the Israelites to....murder & rape their enemies. Great plan! God fails again. Like I said, why go through this roundabout way of making the Isrealites do your dirty work? Especially since God has no qualms directly killing people in other parts of the bible. The answer is that it's not God who is condoning this, it is man. Let's move on to something else already, sheesh.
Also, I don't appreciate your assertion that I don't care about genocide. Of course I care. You may have been desensitized to it since you figure God can do whatever he wants, but I still consider it a heinous crime, and luckily so does the rest of the international community. Again, real justice would be holding a trial and judging those responsible, or if you have the powers of God, simply removing the wicked people & giving them their own punishment. Real justice does not involve marching in, taking slaves, taking women as concubines, and slaughtering the rest, including animals. Very simple concept that I'm not sure how else I can explicate.
Your god - if he, she, or it even exists - is far inferior to the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot comprehend the inifinite greatness of Flying Spaghetti Monster for your human was not created to comprehend Its Holy Noodliness.
Nonsense. Odin created the world from the dead body of Ymir, father of the Frost Giants. The first man and woman were sweated out of Ymir's left underarm. All these "fossils" and "carbon dating" are tricks played by Loki and the Dark Elves of Svartalfaheim. If you have died a valiant death, your soul will travel to Valhöll, where you will be given ale & weapons with which to make merry. Within Thor's hall of Bilskirnir, you can look forward to aeons of brawling & wenching with Odin, Thor and other venerable warriors.
How do I know all this? Because it says so in the Poetic Edda. Plus you can't prove that it's not true, therefore it is.
This religion stuff getting boring.
So who are,
A Determinist?
A Physicalist?
A Nihilist?
A Gödel or Turing?
A Quantum or classic logic "believer"?
Determinist - No. As far as we know, radiation & the Casimir effect have no cause. Tunneling & quantum fluctuations are merely the mechanisms by which these things occur, not the cause. This is the refutation to the creationist's typical "everything must have a cause" argument. I believe that an errant quantum fluctuation could have a real effect on the macroscopic world in the future, but I'm not 100% on this.
Physicalist - Yes
Nihilist - Yes. But I'm not a moral nihilist. I think science has something to say about whether someone is undergoing undue suffering/discomfort.
Gödel or Turing - Not too familiar with the topic.
A Quantum or classic logic "believer" - Quantum. At one time, the universe was smaller than an atom. I don't believe that anyone can perfectly predict how the universe will develop from that point even if they had all the information they needed. I have to admit though, we haven't nailed quantum mechanics yet and the Copenhagen interpretation could be totally wrong.
Quote:
I think evil-doers should get some sort of punishment, dont you think?.
If I killed you and ended your life with your dreams and everything, do
you think its fair if I just disappeared in a puff of smoke without any
punishment or consequence in this life whatsoever?.
Isn't that what hell is for? And all the innocent children had to die to? Again, God's motives for wiping out civilizations fail under any kind of rational scrutiny and I don't see why you think a moral god would do this.
Quote:
You should feel ashamed for not even verifying those claims(The site
seems very biased).
It is biased and it does have some occasional screw-ups. It is still largely valid though. However I'm not interested in arguing scripture anymore as I believe its flaws should be self-evident at this point.
Quote:
God foreknew his creations. Right, Being omnipotent and all knowing. Yet he decided to create them anyway. He knew what Hitler `was going to do` and every other wicked/evil doer. He created them, and their end is eternal destruction.
Its not "God created `wicked` people to destroy them one day`.
Not sure how this is any kind of explanation/refutation.
Quote:
Yea, and we know what happened to the Aztecs and the other South american cultures at the time that did all those stuff. God`s final intervention is coming in the near future. He has given us a blue print for the future.
And here you are defending genocide yet again. Yes, the good Christian Spaniards did slaughter the Mayans & Aztecs. They also killed other different tribes/civilizations with millions of innocent people. You really don't seem to get the concept that when you commit genocide there will inevitably be innocent casualties.
Quote:
Before the Flood, Shortly after mankind was created upon earth
If anyone suffers the most, Its probably God. Because remember being `Holy and Just` as God is, demands punishment for our Sins and evil. And yet, being full of Love requires mercy and great patience from him. Now imagine trying to balance the two?.
No. Just no. An account from the creator of the universe should be something so awe-inspiringly beautiful & perfect that it would bring a tear to your eye. Is that what we have? Hell no. What we have instead is one of the most violent books in history, full of moral depravity and justification for murder, rape, genocide & infanticide. So long as you continue to make up excuses for this, there is nothing anyone will be able to say to convince you otherwise, let alone of the simple moral fact that genocide is the worst crime imaginable.
1. I doubt every tribe/nation at the time shared an equal level of such
depravity and evil.
The Aztecs sacrificed 20000 people per year to their gods in brutal ways. If you're familiar with ancient cultures at all you'd know that all the "moral depravity" you listed was the order of the day back then. Also, why is God's intervention confined to the ancient past? Is it so that these claims can be as unverifiable as possible? So that God can have an excuse to send skeptics to hell when they don't take these archaic religious texts for their word?
Quote:
2. No, God does not care only for the Israelites. These nations were
removed from his sight because of the reasons I mentioned in my last
post.
So where was God during the Stalinist regime or any other evil empire? I'm sure that people in Stalin's & Hitler's death camps prayed their asses off before getting executed. There have been enough brutal regimes & civilizations, and you're fooling yourself if you think the Canaanites were the incarnation of evil. They were humans just like everybody else. I always got the impression that the God of the bible cared more about the fact that they worshipped other gods than he cared about their overall immorality.
Quote:
3. Why should I go out of my way to question the judgements of God in an
effort to prove him a liar and evil?. Especially when the Bible teaches
the contrary and tells you why those nations were removed.
Yes, I get that you're coming from the perspective that God can do whatever he wants because he's the creator of the universe, and it's not our place to question it or we'll go to hell. I'm coming from the perspective that the bible is written by bronze-age men who impose their morality on the fictional god that they invented. This is why God advocates genocide, slavery & rape, even if the bible does provide some paltry excuses once in a while. I mean, just look at this: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/gods_killings.html
Quote:
4. The promise of eternal life is valid if you believe and receive that
truth, and start living your life for God. In all fairness, we are given
choice to either accept or reject God. Both options have their end
results.
I could say the same about Zeus, Wotan & Thor.
Quote:
If you think the genocide in the Old testament was heavy, then you
haven`t read what will befall all the earth in the last days according
to the new testament.
Yes, the bible is one of the most violent books in all of fiction. So again I ask, why do you pretend that genocide is a-ok? The Nazis committed genocide and the human experiments they ran were monstrous. So did we steamroll in and kill every last German? No. We held the Nuremburg trials and imprisoned those who were responsible. That is justice. God's genocides are little more than bronze-age brutality/revenge.
You say that "god removed them from his sight" instead of "god ordered them slaughtered down to the last child." If God were just, he would have actually considered the former option. Physically remove all the evil-doers from existence instead of forcing people to kill on his behalf, and then punishing them if they don't. That's what a real god would do. The account of the Israelis walking in & murdering their way across the middle-east reads like nothing more than a long-winded justification for why they can kill whoever they want & do whatever they want, as opposed to being an actual legitimate account from the creator of this universe.
Quote:
Point is, God is the same in the old and new testaments.
The bible is clear on who is going to inherit eternal life, and those that are going to be destroyed/tormented with Satan.
Jews and christians are not favored anymore over those that never really knew Jesus or came to an understanding of God
"The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made". (Psalms 145: 8-9)
That's a nice theory but the bible says different:
“Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6).
“There is salvation in no one else…no other name under heaven…by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
My personal favorites are "Don't laugh", "Don't get circumcised", "Don't be a Jew", "Hate your own life" and "Wait and come for 1335 days." Luckily I'm not a Jew, so I'm all set.
Grad, good points there. But what if God's "unchanging" nature means like a sort of personality. Surely, if a person changes his mind doesn't mean he's a completely different person right?
Malachi 3:6 - "For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed."
Numbers 23:19 - “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent.”
James 1:17 - "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
God is supposed to unchanging. Immutability is supposed to be one of his traits, along with omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc. God is supposed to be perfection realized, so he is not allowed to change his mind. I think we can only assume that man's account of god is flawed.
let me ask you this. in this 'modern age' meaning 2012, why is it that we can not create life? with all the science that we now posses. we can map a human brain, we can determine what cells in the body are cancer, we can find out exactly what is wrong with anyone down to the DNA that a person has. but one thing that is not possible is when your dead, they bring you back to life, good as new... you might want to argue with a person can be called dead for 5-10minutes and they revive them... this is not what i am saying, what iam trying to say is that george died by drowning in this own pool yesterday and they found him 36hrs later floating, why not just 'revive' him? because it can not be done. now the question based on "prove god exists", show me a guy who has been saved from death after 24hrs from 'science'. The only time anyone has been so called, brought back from the dead, was you know who in the bible. also science does not disprove the 'creation' theory, if anything it proves the perfection of a creation theory. god sappose to be the smartest 'thing' that ever existed. so when 'science' says this and that about anything in 'new' advances in technology or information it just shows how 'smart' god had to have been. or no? :P
Science works through deduction & inference. Our best scanning electron microscopes cannot see actual nucleotide connections on DNA. It's simply too small. Furthermore, creating life requires knowledge not just of DNA but how the proteins fold & damn near everything else is going to work too. How much info can DNA store? It's near-infinite because the information can be combined in many different ways, the same way that music can. One recent estimate shows that a human can store 295 exabytes of information. And that's only 1%. The other 99% is junk DNA.
So the answer to your question: why can't we create life even though we can come to understand it? The same reason why we can't stop the tides from coming in & out even though we know how they work. The same reason we can't blow up suns or travel to other star systems even though we understand those too.
Religion doesn't really have to clash with science it's good for two diffrent reasons
I disagree. Religion makes factual statements about reality. So theists shouldn't be offended when they're told that their version of reality is wrong. You don't see theoretical physicists getting offended that someone is challenging one of their theories, etc, because that's the order of the day in science.
You make a good point. And this is mostly why I think Science at the
moment is so puffed-up. It has this image of "we know everything" but in
reality it knows very little.
For this reason also, I think there is so much "looking up to" granted
to science by many people, that whatever "science" is supposedly saying
people immediately attribute it as truth, and an absolute, infallible
truth so that Science and their public figures seem to look like a cult.
This is true to an extent. But I think everyone would agree that the person who claims to "know it all" or know something for a 100% fact is not doing science correctly. Science is different from religion in that it strives to question itself and prove its own theories wrong, whereas religion only seeks to find proof for its already per-determined conclusions. Many people say that science never gives irrefutable proof of anything. Science is humble.
The Canaanites were in fact a very wicked collection of nations, with whom God had been patient for at least 400 years. (Those who object to God's lack of mercy should bear those centuries of forbearance in mind.The Lord had predicted that Abraham’s descendants would claim the land when “the sin of the Amorites” reached its “full measure” (Genesis 15:16b). This “full measure” of sin was attained by the Canaanites in the generation leading to the Jewish conquest.) They were established on a culture of war, fighting internally and externally. They often had their own genocidal intentions. Their religion was one of idolatry, polytheism, ritual prostitution (male-female and homosexual), bestiality, and ritual child sacrifice:
The idea of god sitting there and being patient with a group of peoples & hoping that they will change, when he is supposed to be omniscient & know these things already, kind of confounds me. And I don't expect God actually gave them any warning before he wiped out their entire civilization, since, you know, that would be too reasonable. Sure, I can grant that Caananites were wicked people. Too bad that in the ancient world, these types of crimes were going on in every other part of the planet. So we're expected to believe that God only cares about the Israelites and that's why he condoned genocide in this case? Everyone was slaughtered: infants, newborns, pregnant women, the elderly, children, etc. Genocide is the worst crime imaginable. So why do you worship a God who's morals are no better than a bronze-age caveman's?
What happened to Christ dieing for us and thereby redeeming all our sins? When Jesus was traveling through Samaritan territory, his disciples asked if God was ready to rain fire down upon them. Jesus's response was "You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them." What happened to that? Did God change his mind about genocide then? Not only did God command violence in that case, but will punish you if you DON'T kill them all:
"But if the Israelites don't kill them all, then God will make them pricks in their eyes and thorns in their sides. And he will do unto the Israelites as he planned to do to the inhabitants of Canaan."
To me, this type of stone-age ethnic cleansing of peoples that are "morally inferior" is no different than this:
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: 'by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.' "
What's your view on the idea of the concept of 'God' as, in contrast to being an actual entity, is itself just an idea, however abstract?
From a writer's perspective he's a Mary-Sue. Omnipotent. Omnibenevolent. Omniscient. Etc. All of these are childish & unrealistic concepts. They can't exist unless you start making concessions, like saying that God is omnibenevolent, but still permits evil because he is trying to teach us a lesson (like when he wipes out humanity with a flood). Or like saying that he is omnipotent but he can create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it. Or like saying that he is omniscient yet can't predict free will (Eve eating from the tree of knowledge). Speaking of which, what was the point of leaving his arch-nemesis (the serpent) in the garden along with Adam & Eve? :P
1. I believe there are no factual or historic errors in the bible. Translation errors and differences are definitely there, this is a given considering its been translated from Hebrew, Greek, Latin etc. A perfect 1:1 translation(word for word meaning) is probably not possible, and the purest understanding would be reading it in the Hebrew version.
Is there a "best" translation? Or is nobody allowed to point out errors because you can just point to a different translation anytime one is found? Personally I want to know what the excuse is for people living to be 900 years old, and the other stuff I listed earlier. Why does God allow the Israelites to slaughter their way through Canaanites & Midianites or allow any of the following: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/genocide.html
Atheists are often asked what stops them from going on a murder spree & doing whatever they want. Well, the attitude of the Israelites is exactly one of doing whatever you want & killing anyone who gets in your way. I've heard some bizarre excuses for this, like "these people go to heaven after they die anyway" or "they were a morally inferior cancer that deserved to be wiped out" or "god made it so they felt no pain".
Dragons are the least of the bible's "hard-to-believe" segments, to put it mildly. :P
1. Fire breathing monster in the book of job
2. Giants once walked the earth
3. People once lived to be 800 years old
4. A talking donkey
5. The trinity. God gives birth to himself so that he can sacrifice himself to himself
6. Samson slays 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass. This is basically Christianity's version of Hercules.
7. Man lived in a whale for 3 days
8. Jacob wrestles with god & WINS
You could replace any of this with stories like Jack & the Beanstalk, and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
No child should be told that they'll burn in hell forever if they don't
believe.
Speaking of hell, one reason why i refuse to accept most modern
religions, is because of the afterlife "punishment side", I mean, what
crime could possibly be bad enough so that they will be tortured forever
(and ever)?
I can't think of anybody who deserves that kind of fate. Maybe Stalin & Hitler. But after more than a few weeks of painful 24 hrs per day torture, it becomes nothing more than pointless stone-age sadism & cruelty. God should have known what Hitler & Stalin were going to do before he created them in the first place. Anytime God creates a being worthy of burning in hell, he is creating someone for the sole purpose of eternal torture.
This is why Jews don't believe in hell (well, to the best of my knowledge).
Why? then they would just pick the one with colorful rainbows where nothing ever gets hurt..
They probably wouldn't pick any religion because they're all indistinguishable, apart from details. There is as much evidence for the other religions in existence. No child should be told that they'll burn in hell forever if they don't believe. Children should be raised to think critically & independently so they can come to their own choices. At least that way, if they pick something, like Buddhism, it will be their decision and not their parents'.
Speaking of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama once said: "If science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change." That's something I can respect.
That is the downside, yes. I don't miss Christianity, but I do miss the prospect of seeing my dead relatives in heaven, or of criminals/victims receiving justice in the afterlife.
I'm an atheist. My biggest gripe though has to be indoctrination of children. If children have to be taught something, then I think children should learn about all religions & then be allowed to pick for themselves.
The biblical chronology puts the flood at 2345 BC, so again, my point is made. The tombs dated from the time of the flood have no evidence of flooding either.
The epic of Gilgamesh is a myth. The flood was said to have occured in the early dynastic period. Here is a sample of the history from this period:
"The main part of the third millennium, now called the Early Dynastic period, saw the gradual development of Sumerian civilization, based on numerous city states. From the Early Dynastic period comes the earliest Sumerian literature, including the epic poetry about Gilgamesh. The Sumerians lived in a complex, unpredictable and frequently hostile environment. They had to contend with floods, droughts, storms, dust, heat, disease and death. They strove to uncover order and organization in the world to overcome feelings of futility and powerlessness. "
No mention of a global flood, and no mention of something as important as humanity being wiped out.
There are more differences in the flood myths than similarities by virtue of the fact that the myth is reinvented by every culture. But people also independently came up with the ideas that disease is caused by demons and that dragons existed, just like people all over the world claim to have seen aliens & UFOs. Whatever myths people independently created in ancient history do not give any extra weight to anything or mean anything.
The flood of Gilgamesh was written before 2000 B.C, and Genesis was written in 400 BC, so I fail to see how it's other religions that are doing the plagiarizing. You need to start considering the fact that your religion has some serious elements of plagiarism, like that Jesus is basically a copy of Mithra.
Couple things:
1) This proves that there was a flood in the Gulf of Mexico, not the entire planet. If you want to prove a global flood, it has to be in all the ice cores, and it's not in the Greenland ice cores.
2) Noah's flood was not 10000 years ago, therefore this can all be dismissed right off the bat.
3) I find it funny that you dismissed my sources as "biased", even though I haven't seen you get your info from anywhere else besides creationist websites. Here is the one that you copy/pasted your latest info from: http://www.earthage.org/floodevidences/more_flood_evidences.htm
Aside from the fact that the info comes from a Reader's Digest article (not the most prestigious of scientific journals), it's the front page of the site that bothers me the most. Seriously. Here is their understanding of evolution:
or
facepalm
I fail to see why. Theists make factual statement about physical reality and so far they're the only ones that can't seem to move on after their theories are discredited. When people deny core scientific frameworks like evolution, it starts to become a problem.
That's because the ancient world had plenty of floods, some of them serious ones at that. Theists misrepresent whatever evidence they can find for any flood because they don't actually care about geology & science. The only time theists care about science is when they're trying to find proof for their already pre-determined conclusions. Obviously not all theists, but still.
Just give it a rest dude. I've heard every excuse for genocide imaginable by now.
That's fantastic, but we're not talking about Sodom & Gomorrah, so it's not a very good answer.
I...never said it was the main reason. In fact I said "justifications", as in, plural. But thanks for conceding the point I guess? <_<
I used to be a Christian, and it's not difficult to cherrypick the meaning or translation to justify pretty much any passage you want. I won't be making any more assumptions about the bible because Tolkfan was pretty much right, debating this book is like debating batman vs. superman. It seems that you've already made up your mind that the bible "is the most perfect & historically accurate book ever" so there's nothing else to discuss. But at least I can learn some more about geology.
Christians: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Jews: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Sikhs: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Hindus: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Muslims: "my faith in the evidence proves that my religion is the best"
Alright let's look at the first link.
Right, and that's because the Earth is not 6000 years old. High altitudes are from tectonic plates moving which causes Earth's crust to rise. That's why when you look at rock strata you look at the rock type, not the location. Radiometric dating has also confirmed this independently. Whoever wrote this must have failed middle-school geology class.
Wrong: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080416104320.htm
This is just dumb. There are plenty of artifacts from civilizations older than 5000 BC, plenty of which are nowhere near the ark, like China.
Again, see a middle-school geology textbook & plate tectonics. The same rock strata also prove that no such flood existed and that the Earth existed for millions of years prior to this event.
If there was really a global flood it would be on all of the earth, not just most of it. Of course the Earth will largely have sedimentary deposits. What do you expect when 75% of the Earth is covered in water, knowing that land moves, and seabeds rise? North America was underwater 500 million years ago, so what?
Cannot find such a journal, so I can only assume it's as imaginary as this flood. But even if it's true it doesn't mean anything because it's not one of the main mass-extinctions. And I find it funny how creationists are willing to use carbon-dating for this, but not when it comes to the age of the earth or the shroud of Turin. Talk about double-standards.
Your second link discusses the vapor canopy model which is soundly rebutted in my link. There is no record of any flood from the Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations which existed at the time. The geological record & the ice cores disprove the global flood. Period. The debate has been over. The rest of the world is simply waiting on theists to catch up.
Hitler on the Jews:
“...the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear."
Deuteronomy 21:10-14
"As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you."
Go around doing whatever the hell you want to other civilizations? Sounds alot like Hitler's & Stalin's philosophy to me.
You disagree that the bible has genocide, rape & violence? The justifications for genocide I'm talking about are the ones that you're giving me. How do I know these same justifications of "they were evil and deserved to die" weren't invented by the writers much like your so-called prophecies weren't invented after-the-fact? Again, this reads like an account of bronze-age troglodytes, not one from the creator of the universe.
How long are you going to keep repeating this tired old strawman? It's not the "gangbangers" I'm defending. I condemn the killing of women, children & the elderly, which goes along with genocide. I also condemn the fact that God forced people to kill, and punished them if they wouldn't. Forcing someone else to kill is the stuff of psycho-torturers in horror movies, not a benevolent creator.
What's ironic though is that one of your previous justifications for killing the Canaanites was so that their bad morals would not "rub off" on the Israelites.
"You must not do as they do in Egypt, where you used to live, and you must not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you. Do not follow their practices."
So, in an effort to prevent the Israelites from turning into rapists & murderers, God forces the Israelites to....murder & rape their enemies. Great plan! God fails again. Like I said, why go through this roundabout way of making the Isrealites do your dirty work? Especially since God has no qualms directly killing people in other parts of the bible. The answer is that it's not God who is condoning this, it is man. Let's move on to something else already, sheesh.
Also, I don't appreciate your assertion that I don't care about genocide. Of course I care. You may have been desensitized to it since you figure God can do whatever he wants, but I still consider it a heinous crime, and luckily so does the rest of the international community. Again, real justice would be holding a trial and judging those responsible, or if you have the powers of God, simply removing the wicked people & giving them their own punishment. Real justice does not involve marching in, taking slaves, taking women as concubines, and slaughtering the rest, including animals. Very simple concept that I'm not sure how else I can explicate.
Nonsense. Odin created the world from the dead body of Ymir, father of the Frost Giants. The first man and woman were sweated out of Ymir's left underarm. All these "fossils" and "carbon dating" are tricks played by Loki and the Dark Elves of Svartalfaheim. If you have died a valiant death, your soul will travel to Valhöll, where you will be given ale & weapons with which to make merry. Within Thor's hall of Bilskirnir, you can look forward to aeons of brawling & wenching with Odin, Thor and other venerable warriors.
How do I know all this? Because it says so in the Poetic Edda. Plus you can't prove that it's not true, therefore it is.
Determinist - No. As far as we know, radiation & the Casimir effect have no cause. Tunneling & quantum fluctuations are merely the mechanisms by which these things occur, not the cause. This is the refutation to the creationist's typical "everything must have a cause" argument. I believe that an errant quantum fluctuation could have a real effect on the macroscopic world in the future, but I'm not 100% on this.
Physicalist - Yes
Nihilist - Yes. But I'm not a moral nihilist. I think science has something to say about whether someone is undergoing undue suffering/discomfort.
Gödel or Turing - Not too familiar with the topic.
A Quantum or classic logic "believer" - Quantum. At one time, the universe was smaller than an atom. I don't believe that anyone can perfectly predict how the universe will develop from that point even if they had all the information they needed. I have to admit though, we haven't nailed quantum mechanics yet and the Copenhagen interpretation could be totally wrong.
Isn't that what hell is for? And all the innocent children had to die to? Again, God's motives for wiping out civilizations fail under any kind of rational scrutiny and I don't see why you think a moral god would do this.
It is biased and it does have some occasional screw-ups. It is still largely valid though. However I'm not interested in arguing scripture anymore as I believe its flaws should be self-evident at this point.
Not sure how this is any kind of explanation/refutation.
And here you are defending genocide yet again. Yes, the good Christian Spaniards did slaughter the Mayans & Aztecs. They also killed other different tribes/civilizations with millions of innocent people. You really don't seem to get the concept that when you commit genocide there will inevitably be innocent casualties.
There was no flood: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
No. Just no. An account from the creator of the universe should be something so awe-inspiringly beautiful & perfect that it would bring a tear to your eye. Is that what we have? Hell no. What we have instead is one of the most violent books in history, full of moral depravity and justification for murder, rape, genocide & infanticide. So long as you continue to make up excuses for this, there is nothing anyone will be able to say to convince you otherwise, let alone of the simple moral fact that genocide is the worst crime imaginable.
The Aztecs sacrificed 20000 people per year to their gods in brutal ways. If you're familiar with ancient cultures at all you'd know that all the "moral depravity" you listed was the order of the day back then. Also, why is God's intervention confined to the ancient past? Is it so that these claims can be as unverifiable as possible? So that God can have an excuse to send skeptics to hell when they don't take these archaic religious texts for their word?
So where was God during the Stalinist regime or any other evil empire? I'm sure that people in Stalin's & Hitler's death camps prayed their asses off before getting executed. There have been enough brutal regimes & civilizations, and you're fooling yourself if you think the Canaanites were the incarnation of evil. They were humans just like everybody else. I always got the impression that the God of the bible cared more about the fact that they worshipped other gods than he cared about their overall immorality.
Yes, I get that you're coming from the perspective that God can do whatever he wants because he's the creator of the universe, and it's not our place to question it or we'll go to hell. I'm coming from the perspective that the bible is written by bronze-age men who impose their morality on the fictional god that they invented. This is why God advocates genocide, slavery & rape, even if the bible does provide some paltry excuses once in a while. I mean, just look at this: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/gods_killings.html
I could say the same about Zeus, Wotan & Thor.
Yes, the bible is one of the most violent books in all of fiction. So again I ask, why do you pretend that genocide is a-ok? The Nazis committed genocide and the human experiments they ran were monstrous. So did we steamroll in and kill every last German? No. We held the Nuremburg trials and imprisoned those who were responsible. That is justice. God's genocides are little more than bronze-age brutality/revenge.
You say that "god removed them from his sight" instead of "god ordered them slaughtered down to the last child." If God were just, he would have actually considered the former option. Physically remove all the evil-doers from existence instead of forcing people to kill on his behalf, and then punishing them if they don't. That's what a real god would do. The account of the Israelis walking in & murdering their way across the middle-east reads like nothing more than a long-winded justification for why they can kill whoever they want & do whatever they want, as opposed to being an actual legitimate account from the creator of this universe.
Disagree. God isn't even the same within each testament.
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/all_saved.html
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/castrated.html
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/anger.html
That's a nice theory but the bible says different:
“Jesus said to him, I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but through Me” (John 14:6).
“There is salvation in no one else…no other name under heaven…by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Ok maybe that's not entirely true. There are actually 189 ways to get saved: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/saved.html
My personal favorites are "Don't laugh", "Don't get circumcised", "Don't be a Jew", "Hate your own life" and "Wait and come for 1335 days." Luckily I'm not a Jew, so I'm all set.
Hey your theory is as good as mine. :P
Gna & madlib:
Malachi 3:6 - "For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed."
Numbers 23:19 - “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent.”
James 1:17 - "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
God is supposed to unchanging. Immutability is supposed to be one of his traits, along with omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc. God is supposed to be perfection realized, so he is not allowed to change his mind. I think we can only assume that man's account of god is flawed.
Science works through deduction & inference. Our best scanning electron microscopes cannot see actual nucleotide connections on DNA. It's simply too small. Furthermore, creating life requires knowledge not just of DNA but how the proteins fold & damn near everything else is going to work too. How much info can DNA store? It's near-infinite because the information can be combined in many different ways, the same way that music can. One recent estimate shows that a human can store 295 exabytes of information. And that's only 1%. The other 99% is junk DNA.
So the answer to your question: why can't we create life even though we can come to understand it? The same reason why we can't stop the tides from coming in & out even though we know how they work. The same reason we can't blow up suns or travel to other star systems even though we understand those too.
I disagree. Religion makes factual statements about reality. So theists shouldn't be offended when they're told that their version of reality is wrong. You don't see theoretical physicists getting offended that someone is challenging one of their theories, etc, because that's the order of the day in science.
This is true to an extent. But I think everyone would agree that the person who claims to "know it all" or know something for a 100% fact is not doing science correctly. Science is different from religion in that it strives to question itself and prove its own theories wrong, whereas religion only seeks to find proof for its already per-determined conclusions. Many people say that science never gives irrefutable proof of anything. Science is humble.
The idea of god sitting there and being patient with a group of peoples & hoping that they will change, when he is supposed to be omniscient & know these things already, kind of confounds me. And I don't expect God actually gave them any warning before he wiped out their entire civilization, since, you know, that would be too reasonable. Sure, I can grant that Caananites were wicked people. Too bad that in the ancient world, these types of crimes were going on in every other part of the planet. So we're expected to believe that God only cares about the Israelites and that's why he condoned genocide in this case? Everyone was slaughtered: infants, newborns, pregnant women, the elderly, children, etc. Genocide is the worst crime imaginable. So why do you worship a God who's morals are no better than a bronze-age caveman's?
What happened to Christ dieing for us and thereby redeeming all our sins? When Jesus was traveling through Samaritan territory, his disciples asked if God was ready to rain fire down upon them. Jesus's response was "You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them." What happened to that? Did God change his mind about genocide then? Not only did God command violence in that case, but will punish you if you DON'T kill them all:
"But if the Israelites don't kill them all, then God will make them pricks in their eyes and thorns in their sides. And he will do unto the Israelites as he planned to do to the inhabitants of Canaan."
To me, this type of stone-age ethnic cleansing of peoples that are "morally inferior" is no different than this:
"Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: 'by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.' "
From a writer's perspective he's a Mary-Sue. Omnipotent. Omnibenevolent. Omniscient. Etc. All of these are childish & unrealistic concepts. They can't exist unless you start making concessions, like saying that God is omnibenevolent, but still permits evil because he is trying to teach us a lesson (like when he wipes out humanity with a flood). Or like saying that he is omnipotent but he can create a rock so heavy that he can't lift it. Or like saying that he is omniscient yet can't predict free will (Eve eating from the tree of knowledge). Speaking of which, what was the point of leaving his arch-nemesis (the serpent) in the garden along with Adam & Eve? :P
Is there a "best" translation? Or is nobody allowed to point out errors because you can just point to a different translation anytime one is found? Personally I want to know what the excuse is for people living to be 900 years old, and the other stuff I listed earlier. Why does God allow the Israelites to slaughter their way through Canaanites & Midianites or allow any of the following: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/genocide.html
Atheists are often asked what stops them from going on a murder spree & doing whatever they want. Well, the attitude of the Israelites is exactly one of doing whatever you want & killing anyone who gets in your way. I've heard some bizarre excuses for this, like "these people go to heaven after they die anyway" or "they were a morally inferior cancer that deserved to be wiped out" or "god made it so they felt no pain".
Dragons are the least of the bible's "hard-to-believe" segments, to put it mildly. :P
1. Fire breathing monster in the book of job
2. Giants once walked the earth
3. People once lived to be 800 years old
4. A talking donkey
5. The trinity. God gives birth to himself so that he can sacrifice himself to himself
6. Samson slays 1000 men with the jawbone of an ass. This is basically Christianity's version of Hercules.
7. Man lived in a whale for 3 days
8. Jacob wrestles with god & WINS
You could replace any of this with stories like Jack & the Beanstalk, and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
I can't think of anybody who deserves that kind of fate. Maybe Stalin & Hitler. But after more than a few weeks of painful 24 hrs per day torture, it becomes nothing more than pointless stone-age sadism & cruelty. God should have known what Hitler & Stalin were going to do before he created them in the first place. Anytime God creates a being worthy of burning in hell, he is creating someone for the sole purpose of eternal torture.
This is why Jews don't believe in hell (well, to the best of my knowledge).
Clearly we're going by the second, broader, definition. Not that that's the point.
^-what's the difference? :P
They probably wouldn't pick any religion because they're all indistinguishable, apart from details. There is as much evidence for the other religions in existence. No child should be told that they'll burn in hell forever if they don't believe. Children should be raised to think critically & independently so they can come to their own choices. At least that way, if they pick something, like Buddhism, it will be their decision and not their parents'.
Speaking of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama once said: "If science shows Buddhism to be wrong, then Buddhism must change." That's something I can respect.
That is the downside, yes. I don't miss Christianity, but I do miss the prospect of seeing my dead relatives in heaven, or of criminals/victims receiving justice in the afterlife.
I'm an atheist. My biggest gripe though has to be indoctrination of children. If children have to be taught something, then I think children should learn about all religions & then be allowed to pick for themselves.