Wayne Delia

Do you have any idea what would have happened to the earth if that kind of inertia of motion of rotation was overcome? Look what size tsunami's can be generated from a single earthquake. Now imagine that happening everywhere on earth, all at the same time.

Then again, maybe it's just a myth.

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Wayne Delia

On the contrary, I am learning new things every day at the ripe old age of 48, but those things are usually accompanied by supporting evidence. God myths are a dime a dozen, and they all have the same amount of supporting evidence: none.

Meanwhile, I am positive that rhutchin won't accept anything, including the painful fact that he's gotten clobbered in just about every topic he's wandered into. This is just an exercise to critically analyze religious positions and finding new and creative ways to rebut them. For example, in the previous thread "No True Christian," rhutchin came up with a list of four criteria that he claimed were the Biblical rules for determining whether someone was a Christian. Everyone alive fails one of those criteria, and rhutchin explicitly violated two others, so in coming up with a definition, he excluded himself form being a Christian.

I'm only using rhutchin as a "foil", as it were, to demonstrate the irrationality of the fundamentalist Christian position. Without someone like him to actually make the refutable statements, no opportunity exists to try out creative new refutations, and any refutation would be nothing more than a strawman argument. "Fundy Christians think Adam wrote the book of Genesis" is just a strawman argument, but it can be refuted when people like rhutchin step up to the plate to strike out.

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gregor

rhutchin

I'm not certain that you made any points - I'm just saying it's clear that this discussion will get nowhere. It's doomed to failure when your only response is "because the bible says so" and the only authority is AIG. Come on, ANSWERS IN GENESIS?!? You know, the guys who think Fred Flintstone is actual history.

The fruitful BC&H discussions are those where people bring something rational to be discussed (e.g. is there evidence for a united monarchy, what stories are pre-exilic, does some inscription actually mention a "house of David", is the documentary hypothesis still a solid idea).

Wayne Delia

That's a head-scratcher. I happen to believe in nature's harmonic simultaneous 4-day Time Cube (not really, but bear with me), and as evidence I present www.timecube.com, which is a hysterical ranting by someone echoing the same assertions, with no proof at all. (Check it out, by the way - it is a monument to obsessive/compulsive schizophrenic psychosis.)

Well... uh.... regular weather patterns make small hailstones, and therefore only God could make large hailstones, and therefore God exists, and so He miracled it all.

The begged question is "WHY?" It's all theatrics - very bad theatrics.

Well, technically, it is moving, but to our perspective it is stationary.

As Delia said, "It is absurd, so I withhold belief."

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Wayne Delia

Answers in Genesis? cough-cough-total-bullshit-cough-cough.

From the website: "Joshua’s command to the sun to stand still does not support geocentrism, i.e. the idea that the sun moves around the Earth. The Bible uses the language of appearance and observation." But for the sun to "appear" to keep a fixed position for a full 24-hour rotation of the earth, the sun would at least temporarily have had to orbit the earth, in order to maintain the fixed position. The mechanics of that would be at least the annihilation of the solar system. The page goes on to suggest possibilities, but offers no explanation apart from the cherished "God miracled it" cop-out.

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Wayne Delia

Gregor never said anything about "Each side has made its points." You are misrepresenting again. Why the need to be so intellectually dishonest?

I've made my points, which have refuted your points. You cannot even bring yourself to address them.

Further, you missed the point of gregor's last paragraph: your position on Adam's authorship of Genesis was ridiculed and debunked. You never addressed the criticism of the survival of Adam's recordings through the Great Flood only three chapters later. Even if Adam was stupid enough to decide to record Genesis by chiseling it into stone character by character in a language not yet invented, the tablets would have been crushed by the weight of the flood waters.

All you're doing is throwing out possibilities instead of supporting your point. Claiming something is possible certainly does not imply that it necessarily happened.

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Wayne Delia

As usual, you misunderstand. Your claim is that the sun stopping in the sky for 24 hours as recorded in Joshua is valid, because it is allegedly supported by "historical records" in the Bible. The problem is, a Moslem would make assertions corresponding to the Islam theology based on the "historical records" in the Qu'ran. You seem to dismiss that, but if you are using the same line of reasoning for your own argument, your case is just as strong as the case for the Qu'ran.

The question isn't whether one is free to investigate anything. The question is whether you accept the supernatural stories of Islam based on the "historical records" of the Qu'ran. If not, you've undermined your own line of reasoning.

You're still not sure of the meaning of "atheist", are you? Atheism is defined not by a belief, but by a lack of belief. There are two types of belief: the religious "faith" which you pretend to have (remember, you're not actually a Christian, according to the Biblical criteria you posted), but that's based on a complete lack of evidence. There's also a belief based on confidence in the repeatability and reliability of experiments involving actual, physical, tangible evidence. What you're doing here is trying to drag scientific confidence and reasonable certainty down to the level of religious dogma. It's known as the "we all have faith, why not accept my faith" equivocation. And it ain't pretty.

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Wayne Delia

I'm sure that rhutchin will be pleased to see you agree with him 100% - even though you don't agree with him at all. When the debate isn't going his way, he has a tendency to misrepresent many different things, including the Bible itself.

But the existence of Flintstones cartoons is evidence that man and dinosaurs coexisted. It just isn't very strong evidence. Sure, cartoons can be made by humans today, but that doesn't discount the possibility that God inspired Hanna-Barbara to show the Truth in cartoon form. Besides, the cartoons are accepted by those who already believe, and who are we to argue with them? (Thus endeth the parody of "Answers in Genesis.")

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rhutchin

Actually, I think it is the atheists who believe in the whole caveman thing. The Bible says that man was created within the last 15,000 years so there would never have been a "Fred Flinstone" caveman type person.

I agree on the purpose for BC&H. I do not have a background in ancient history or archeology, and it does not appear that many who participate do. Consequently, I have to defer to those organizations that investigate these things. It would be nice to have the smart guys weighing in and allow the rest of us to follow the discussions.

rhutchin

My claim is that the Bible is an historical document and it describes an event in the book of Joshua where the sun stooped moving in its normal path (from a point of perspective on earth) from east to west. Others (the Koran) may make different assertions of which I am not aware. I do not have the time to research everything (and you do not seem to be able to do so either). There are many possible views on this, even an atheist view, and we each come to a conclusion based on a limited amount of information to support our conclusions.

If the supernatural stories in the Bible, the Koran, or an atheist book disagree, then you have to decide that which you will believe. Even where there are no conflicts, one must often decide what to believe.

FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist

"Atheism, in its broadest sense, is characterized by an absence of belief in the existence of gods, thus contrasting with theism. This definition includes both those who assert that there are no gods and those who have no beliefs at all regarding the existence of gods. However, narrower definitions often only qualify the former as atheism, the latter falling under the more general (but rarely used) term nontheism.

Although atheists often share common concerns regarding evidence and the scientific method of investigation and a large number are skeptics, there is no single ideology that all atheists share. Additionally there are atheists who are religious or spiritual, though many of these would not describe themselves as atheists."

Basically an atheist is "a theist" or not a theist. It does not mean that an atheist does not belief in something, only that the atheist does not belief that which the theist believes.