Johnny Skeptic

Message to Lee Merrill: In addition to my previous post, I suggest that you participate in the thread that I started yesterday at the GRD forum that is titled 'Do miracle healings happen today'? It is already attracting a good deal of attention from Christians and skeptics. You once said that personal experience is an important and necessary part of your belief system, so now you have an excellent opportunity to try to convince other people that you are right about miracle healings. The GRD forum is easily the most visited forum here at the IIDB, so you should not want miss this excellent oppurtunity to share your views about miracle healings. I predict that you will refuse to participate in that thread.

lee_merrill

Hi everyone,

Well, I must say I don't see how my reply does not address your question, could you please clarify what I have misunderstood here?

Where, though, are the photographs of the 300 foot-high walls? And of the current inhabitants? Putative prior inhabitants can be argued about, city-dwellers there now, however, cannot.

But none of this tells me why your claim that people set up house in the middle of the ruins of Babylon is true. What you need to do is to defend your claim further, not predict what I will do! Why is it probable that these people set up house in the ruins of Babylon? Not near any stores, by all accounts, and the water is, well, it's basically swamp area, where will you dig a well? And the place has a plague of mosquitos, and malaria is a serious problem. So I conclude that it is not probable that people would choose to live there, given also the lack of archaeological protest of these putative buildings that were there before Saddam started his palace.

Actually, I would say the main benefit is that they would have a convincing argument to raise with the Christians! "Look, the Bible is obviously corrupted, so now consider the Qu'ran."

I would again say that they would have a substantial argument to raise with the Christians! "See, it clearly says in your Bible that Babylon will never be rebuilt or reinhabited, may I introduce you to the mayor of Babylon? Would you like to walk around the wall? Tour the palaces? Ride the streets?"

No, I'm just saying that if someone disagrees with me, I require that they convince me.

But there is also a verse that implies that even such knowledge of this from a false prophet is not from some other source than God! He may give knowledge of the future to some false prophet like Baalam, for instance, so this would still confirm that only God can do this, and this becomes even more plain when people set out to do what God says cannot be done. As Balak did with Baalam!

Numbers 23:23 There is no sorcery against Jacob, no divination against Israel. It will now be said of Jacob and of Israel, 'See what God has done!'

And this was in response to Balak trying to wipe out the Jewish people, let us note! He also failed, you can't fight against God...

Well, I have to choose which threads iI look into! I have lots of stuff I would like to do, and I can't do all of them, and my alarm clock goes off at 6 AM tomorrow, and it's almost pumpkin time.

Regards,
Lee

John A. Broussard

John B.: Why are you, of all people, the final arbiter of what Babylon has to consist of?

Lee: Well, I was not asked what other people would think of as rebuilding Babylon! So I presented what I would consider this to be.

John B.: This may be an answer to some question, but it certainly isn't the answer to the question I asked.

Lee: Well, I must say I don't see how my reply does not address your question, could you please clarify what I have misunderstood here?

I apologize. Here I thought you were saying that the Babylon prophesy could be considered fulfilled if it met the criteria you layed down.

Since you are now saying that this is merely your guess and are not claiming that anyone else shares this belief, why I was obviously assuming too much.

Johnny Skeptic

Well, let's see what Christians have to say about your assertion. Would a representative sampling of liberal Christians and a representative sample of conservative Christians satisfy you? If so, how many Christians in each group should be polled in order to satisfy you? The following two questions would be asked: 1) If Babylon were to be rebuilt, or if Arabs were to pitch their tents in Babylon, would you give up Christianity? 2) If so, would you consider becoming a Muslim?

I suggest that we do the following: 1) I could conduct a poll at some at the forums here at the IIDB, and you could conduct a poll at the Theology Web and at several churches of your choosing. 2) I could contact a good number of pastors, and some professors at leading Christian colleges and seminaries. 3) You could contact the U.S. State Department and ask them if the U.S. would adopt a friendly foreign policy towards Muslims if Babylon were to be rebuilt, or if Arabs were to pitch their tents there. How about it, Lee? You made an assertion, and it would be quite easy to find out if your assertion is true. Knowing you, you will find fault with my suggestions because you are well aware that the polls would embarrass you. If you do find fault with my suggestions, I will conduct the polls anyway.

Just as I thought, you refused to visit the thread at the GRD forum that is titled 'Do miracle healings happen today'?, even though you have said that personal experience is an important part of your belief system.

Johnny Skeptic

So what? There is no logical correlation that can be made between the ability to predict the future and goodness. Deuteronomy 13 admits it. I do not believe that God is good in accordance with the human understanding of the word “good.� Hurricane Katrina is proof enough that God is not good. If you have evidence that God is good, then by all means please post it.

Oh but you can. The Philistines demolished the Jews on numerous occasions. Titus destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D., and he killed many thousands of Jews. In the early part of the 2nd century, Trajan went to Palestine to quell a Jewish uprising and killed over 500,000 Jews. Nebuchadnezzar persecuted and killed many thousands of Jews. Hitler killed over 6 million Jews. Your knowledge of history is grossly inadequate.

In case you haven’t noticed, today, most Jews ARE NOT Christians, and most Jews HAVE NEVER been Christians, so they ARE NOT God’s people as far as their race is concerned. In fact, there is no evidence that a sizeable percentage of Jews have ever been Christians. It is interesting to note that there is not ANY non-Biblical evidence at all that God made a land promise to Abraham.

Many thousands of Christians were killed in the Crusades over a number of centuries, partly because of Jews. During the last few decades, many thousands of Christians have been killed in Sudan, and U.S. soldiers continue to be killed in Iraq. Osama Bin Laden said that the events of 9/11/2001 are directly attributable to U.S. support for Israel. He called U.S. support for Israel a return to a Crusader mentality. He was right.

We need to continue discussing this issue is in the thread that is titled “Lee Merrill’s ‘There will always be a Jewish people.’� You conveniently vacated that thread without replying to my most recent post. It is not just the survival of a race that is important, but also what state they survive in. The history of the Jewish race is deplorable. They were opposed and demolished on many occasions by humans, and even by God himself.

For your information, the largest colonial empire in history by far under a single religion was conquered by Christian nations by means of murder, persecution and theft of property. For 90% of the time since Christianity was founded, most Christians endorsed slavery and the subjugation of women. It is quite possible that that would have included you if you had been alive centuries ago.

Jack the Bodiless

Lee:
From Sauron's post #303 on this thread:




And we have already discussed, MANY TIMES, the fact that over a thousand INHABITANTS were moved when Saddam's palace was built.

...And yet they DID.

However, I guess this gives us an insight into another tactic you will use if Babylon IS completely rebuilt, or thousands of genuinely nomadic Arabs pitch tents there: you will simply declare that it's "improbable" that this has happened, therefore it has not.

lee_merrill

Hi everyone,

We are indeed going round and round on this point! And I really don't think it would be so beneficial to do lots of surveys, Johnny, can you guarantee a representative sample? Taking good surveys is difficult...

So blessings to one and all, I think I shall bow out at this point, thanks for the discussion, Johnny S., and John B., and Jack, and everyone...

Regards,
Lee

Sauron

Apparently Johnny was right. Faced with his inability to defend his point, lee_merrill is going to exit and hope nobody remembers the mountain of unsupported claims he shoveled for the last few months.

I guess the only thing remaining is to see whether or not lee pops up again on some other thread / other discussion board, repeating the same tired, refuted claims.

Johnny Skeptic

Is that not what we have been doing since the beginning of these debates? Your admittedly primary argument from the beginning has been that skeptics and Muslims are missing a golden oppurtunity to discredit the Bible by rebuilding Babylon, but you have never told us what this golden oppurtunity consists of.

Why don't you ask the Gallup Poll organization, and the Barna Reserach Group? The Barna Research Group is a polling organization that is run by evangelical Christians? One Barna Research Group poll showed that Baptists have a higher divorce rate the atheists do. Would you like to contact the Barna Research Group and tell them that they should close down their business because they can't guarantee a representative sampling? Both organizations, and other organizations as well, conduct accurate polls all of time to within +/- five percentage points, often much closer. On a number of occasions I have challenged you to conduct a poll IN YOUR OWN CHURCH, but you never accepted my challenges because you are well aware what the results will discredit you more than you have already been discredited. Even if I were to concede that a poll among all of the members of YOUR OWN CHURCH was a representative sampling, you would still lose and you know it. In other words, YOU PICK WHO TO POLL AND LET'S SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

If that is true, then if Babylon were to be rebuilt, following your own same line of reasoning we wouldn't be able to conduct credible polls that would tell us what percentage and number of Christians had given up Christianity.

So now you are an expert in polls and surveys, eh? May I ask where you got your expertise in this area from? Taking good surveys is not at all difficult when the right questions are asked and when the pollsters know what they are doing. It wouldn't take a poll to find out whether or not the U.S. would adopt a friendly foreign policy towards Muslims, so your argument just flew right out of the window again.

Surely you don't expect skeptics to believe that if polls went your way you wouldn't use them as evidence. We skeptics know you much better than that. It would in fact be quite difficult to find a fundamentalist Christian who would not use a poll from a widely respected pollster to help his arguments if the poll agree with him.

We accept your admission of defeat, but I wish that you had waited for a week to resign because I just realized something that would have defeated you at the very beginning of these debates. There is not any evidence at all that God had anything to do with the Babylon prophecy. If Isaiah was speaking for himself and not for God, then if Babylon were to be rebuilt it would be Isaiah who was discredited and not God. Many cities in antiquity have been rebuilt, so if Babylon were to be rebuilt, there would be nothing at all usual about that. I do not believe your claim that you would give up Christianity if Babylon were to be rebuilt, and I doubt if you could find even several other Christians who would give up Christianity if Babylon were to be rebuilt.

If Lee shows up elsewhere and anyone finds out about it, please let me know so I can participate.

lee_merrill

Hi again, everyone!

Well, now you raise a new point...

But Christians believe Isaiah was speaking at the command of God:

2 Peter 1:20-21 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

This is clear Christian doctrine.

Erm, I took a course in statistics. Of course, that doesn't make me an expert! Part of the content of the course was, however, to point out that taking good surveys indeed is difficult. One classic example is a phone survey one group took (I think in the Roosevelt era or thereabouts), before a presidential election, and they predicted the wrong person would win (the other candidate won by a landslide). The problem is that they only surveyed people who had phones, and back then, a lot of people didn't have a phone, and the opinions of these two groups apparently differed considerably.

And I do have something new to say here in response to the following...

Alrighty, I started a poll on TheologyWeb here, and 20% said they would give up Christianity, and 20% would give up the belief that Scripture has no errors, though one person indicated that they already held the latter position.

So your efforts would it seems have an effect, if you succeed! So why do you not do this?

Time to rebuild Babylon, or reinhabit it...

Regards,
Lee