spamandham

If you find the arguments of one person (presuming spin is an atheist - unsure of that) uncompelling, is that really appropriate grounds to dismiss everyone else in that category?

Assuming spin is male, should you likewise dismiss the arguments of all males?

TonyN

Hey Dave B, I wonder where Dean Anderson wandered off to? I thought he was one of the ones that wanted this debate so badly.

As for the rest of you, I simply do not have the time to answer each of you. I can deal with Dave's posts and hopefully Dean's if he appears.

Dave, I'll try to answer you as time permits. I am under a heavy schedule but I really do appreciate you taking the time to give such a thoughtful response and I will give you the honor of returning a likewise thoughtful response as well.

Sven

*sigh* If I say that I don't posit a standard, this obviously does not mean that nobody posits one.

That a claim difficult to support one way or the other. I tried a search at google scholar for "historical accuracy" and got > 7000 hits. Obviously, it's very difficult to determine if the term was used in the context discussed here. Maybe you have a better idea?

Sven

With continents traveling at this rate, everyone would have died. At least if geology worked the same way at this time as it does today. You have given no evidence that it worked differently at this time.

It does. Otherwise we would see evidence of massive earthquakes, tsunamis, vulcanic eruptions etc. etc. (on a scale to end all human life on Earth, especially if it was only a couple of people). We don't. It's as simple as this.

It's beyond laughable that these massive Earth-changing events would only be mentioned in about ten words.

If you have some time, you should think about the evidence in this thread (and perhaps take the entire dicussion of plate tectonics there):
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=196822

David B

thank you. I look forward to it.

David B

Jack the Bodiless

As I am one of "you folks", and as I presented 14 disproofs of the Bible's historicity, and as these have been entirely ignored...

...Then I accept your surrender, Tony. We have now established that the Bible is not historically accurate.

DISSIDENT AGGRESSOR

I concur. From this time forth until the end of eons and beyond, all Bibles shall begin with Once upon a time... so as not to confound fiction and fact, and to properly place the Bible in it's appropriate genre.

MadPhatCat

Hey, I was just getting him to the right forum. And I said "small amount of time" because I knew that time beyond that would be wasted. I am not surprised Tony is claiming he is too busy to deal with anything.

Malachi151

Right, but so what? No one is claiming that ANYONE from ancient times wrote anything that is totally accurate, except people who believe that the Bible is such a book.

We can quite easily discount every single ancient text as historically inaccurate. There is no problem with this.

As is often said though, there are degrees of accuracy. Are people near the bullseye, or did they miss the target?

Yes, people like Tacitus and Josephus wrote many things that obviously are not true, especially Josephus when talking about ancient history, which he himself based on the inaccurate Hebrew scriptures, but they did record events that happened during their day within the proper time frame, which is more than we can say for the Gospels.

Birdman

It certainly can't hurt to come up with an alibi as a counter-attack, so to speak. As long as your alibi is good enough, all the evidence in the world won't work because you weren't there. The burden of proof in on them if they start talking about God and you first ask them to prove it; however if you come out and say that there is no God you yourself are making a claim and must back it up. You could start as simply as "I see no evidence for God in my daily life, perhaps you could enlighten me as to where God has been hiding himself." But I don't agree with simply shrugging the burden of proof onto someone else. We have our evidence (obviously, because a good number of us are atheistic or simply take a grab-bag of a bunch of different religious views and don't practice any defined religion, we must have a reason to not believe in God) so why not use it? A God-believer is going to have a helluva time proving it to us, just the same way that it's going to be hard for us to prove it to them. They're illogical.

I think that it is enough to look at the current large religions - all of them started (relatively) recently, and were born out of older traditions. It would make sense that an older religion, say, the Greeks, had their traditions written down somewhere, just as we have. I heard about a small group of people participating in one of the acient rituals sometime recently, but for the most part it's a dead religion and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who seriously believes that the Greek religion (oftentimes referred to as mythology) is 100% true. I find it funny that people scoff at that belief system while adhering to something just as implausible. Think about where the next 2,000 years are going to take us - will people still be practicing Christianity the way we know it? Be honest - do you really think so?

We have simply traded one truth for another, I really wish that people would develop the wisdom to be able to hold those beliefs to participate in religion for the benefits that a religious system offers without necessitating that everything that their text says is 100% historically accurate. You have to remember who these texts were written by, and, more importantly, why they were written.

I see enough evidence in this thread to prove that the Bible is historically inaccurate - one piece, ok maybe it was just an error. 14-20 MAJOR events that it got wrong in history that other records from that time period disprove....how can one claim that it is at all accurate? I mean it starts off with the most implausible shit ever, you'd think that they'd maybe prepare you a little bit. Maybe they were going for the "shock and awe" tactic.