Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Johnny Skeptic · 03-18-2010, 02:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by archaeologist

Your refusal to allow the Biblical writers, and God, to use metaphors and other language tools shows that you should not be part of any debate or discussion for you are purposefully misapplying what is being said for no gain except to trash the Bible.

But Job 38:17 is in fact a metaphor, so how can you say that skeptics should allow the Bible writers to use metaphors? The verse says "Can you beat out (raqa) the vault of the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal?" That is an obvious metaphor, and it was obviously used by the writer to describe a flat surface since mirrors are flat. The Hebrew word "raqa" and its relatives are used many times in the Old Testament to refer to things that are beaten out. Any reputable Hebrew scholar would tell you that, and even laymen can easily understand that. Only an inerrantist would deny obvious proof.

You are an inerrantist, but you have never provided any evidence that the Bible is inerrant. You are wasting your time preaching. Most people at these forums already know the Bible very well. You need to provide specific, detailed evidence if you wish to adequately justify your worldview. Do you really believe that any skeptic at this forum will give up skepticism because of your ranting and raving? If anything, you are chasing people away from Christianity with your aggressive behavior and lack of evidence.

archaeologist · 03-18-2010, 03:59 PM

Quote:

You are an inerrantist, but you have never provided any evidence that the Bible is inerrant. You are wasting your time preaching. Most people at these forums already know the Bible very well. You need to provide specific, detailed evidence if you wish to adequately justify your worldview.

Not preaching and i do not have to provide any evidence. the Bible is a book of faith and you have to make a decision based upon faith. Any evidence has already been presented no more will be forthcoming.

archaeologist · 03-18-2010, 04:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesABrown

Quote:

Originally Posted by archaeologist

Very insulting. I believe you owe semiopen an apology.

No it isn't as it is a statement of fact, <edited>

Deus Ex · 03-18-2010, 04:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by archaeologist

Quote:

You are an inerrantist, but you have never provided any evidence that the Bible is inerrant. You are wasting your time preaching. Most people at these forums already know the Bible very well. You need to provide specific, detailed evidence if you wish to adequately justify your worldview.

Not preaching and i do not have to provide any evidence. the Bible is a book of faith and you have to make a decision based upon faith. Any evidence has already been presented no more will be forthcoming.

Then what is your purpose here? Is it just to make baseless assertions and declarations of faith?

graymouser · 03-18-2010, 04:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by archaeologist

Not preaching and i do not have to provide any evidence. the Bible is a book of faith and you have to make a decision based upon faith. Any evidence has already been presented no more will be forthcoming.

I wonder if you actually don't realize that you are doing nothing but preaching. You complain about the evidence people offer, then you refuse to provide evidence of your own, and now you hypocritically claim that this is a principled position.

According to the Bible, Jesus said faith could move mountains. Many (if not most) of the people here have tried being faithful Christians, have reached out to the Holy Spirit, and it has failed them. You're talking to people for whom faith has proven to be empty. Start talking hard evidence, or find a place that's amenable to your preaching.

Sheshbazzar · 03-18-2010, 04:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by archaeologist

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesABrown

Quote:

Originally Posted by archaeologist

Very insulting. I believe you owe semiopen an apology.

No it isn't as it is a statement of fact, He does not now anything about Christianity the Bible or God.

No archaeologist, semiopen was commenting on the beliefs of the Haredi Jews.

Quote:

Haredi Jews, even today, claim that the earth does not move around the sun. They wouldn't make this claim unless the bible was clear in this regard.

If that is their belief, and semiopen knows of that belief, then he DOES know something, and he is within his rights to state what it is that he knows about the beliefs of Haredi Jews, and that this IS evidence of how these Jews understand their own Bible to be understood.
Or are you going to claim that the Haredi Jews DO NOT claim to believe what semiopen has stated?

Can you document this 'statement of fact' that the Haredi Jews DO NOT claim to believe according what semiopen has reported?

If you cannot, then you do owe semiopen an apology, whether you are willing to humble yourself enough to apologise or not.
This kind of obtuse conduct destroys any smidgen of respect or of credibility you might otherwise be entitled to.

arnoldo · 03-18-2010, 05:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny Skeptic

Yes, the Bible teaches that the earth is flat. Consider the following:

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/flatearth.htm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Robert J. Shadewald

The Order of Creation

The Genesis creation story provides the first key to the Hebrew cosmology. The order of creation makes no sense from a conventional perspective but is perfectly logical from a flat-earth viewpoint. The earth was created on the first day, and it was "without form and void (Genesis 1:2)." On the second day, a vault, the "firmament" of the King James version, was created to divide the waters, some being above and some below the vault. Only on the fourth day were the sun, moon, and stars created, and they were placed "in" (not "above") the vault.

The Vault of Heaven

The vault of heaven is a crucial concept. The word "firmament" appears in the King James version of the Old Testament 17 times, and in each case it is translated from the Hebrew word raqiya, which meant the visible vault of the sky. The word raqiya comes from riqqua, meaning "beaten out." In ancient times, brass objects were either cast in the form required or beaten into shape on an anvil. A good craftsman could beat a lump of cast brass into a thin bowl. Thus, Elihu asks Job, "Can you beat out (raqa) the vault of the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal (Job 37:18)?"

The Hebrew word raqiya appears five times in Ezekiel, four times in Ezekiel 1:22-26 and once in Ezekiel 10:1. In each case the context requires a literal vault or dome. The vault appears above the "living creatures" and glitters "like a sheet of ice." Above the vault is a throne of sapphire.... Seated on the throne is "a form in human likeness," which is radiant and "like the appearance of the glory of the Lord." In short, Ezekiel saw a vision of God sitting throned on the vault of heaven, as described in Isaiah 40:22.

The following is a counterargument

Quote:

Originally Posted by JPH

A rather common accusation made against the Bible in Skeptical circles is that it teaches a view that promulgates a "flat earth" and contains other primitive cosmological/natural data like a solid, domed sky. Here we will have a look at some of the verses commonly used to assert this position.

We begin with a bit of groundwork. It should be understood that the Hebrews, like all ANE cultures, obviously lacked the scientific terminology we use to describe things today. We should not expect descriptions of "tectonic plates" or of "molten lava". On a lesser scale, we will find that the Hebrews lacked key words which would have been most useful in describing cosmological phenomena.

Furthermore, we will not address certain words and verses that use "phenomenological" language - i.e., sunset, sunrise, or references to sun and stars moving. As we still use such terms today, in spite of hundreds of years of "knowing better", it should not reflect badly upon the use of such language in the Bible.

http://www.tektonics.org/af/earthshape.html

In addition, the following website has information concerning The navy of King Solomon and Israel

Since these ancient jewish sea travelers believed in a flat earth, they were constantly in great fear of falling off the edge of the earth.

Sheshbazzar · 03-18-2010, 05:46 PM

It only took a few minutes searching to turn up this, which certainly seems to confirm semiopens statement;

Quote:

ARE YOU STANDING STILL?: What's Let's start our Purim banquet with an hors d'oeuvre-- a wild diversion, taken from a respectable chassidic journal of science and mysticism. Pour epater le bourgeois-- truth often isn't "balabatish", isn't even "common sense"; the sun does not revolve about the earth, tho it appears to do so.

BUT HOW DO I KNOW THAT?-- MAYBE IT DOES! In B'or Ha'Torah, No. 10 ($12 from TOP), Amnon Goldberg of Tel Aviv bolsters the claims of Dr. Avi Rabinowitz and Prof. Herman Branover in previous issues, that geocentrism is a valid way of looking at the universe:

Bertram Russell admitted that "whether the earth rotates once a day from west to east as Copernicus taught, or the heavens revolve once a day from east to west, as his predecessors held, the observed phenomena will be the same; a metaphysical assumption has to be made". Yet today everybody "just knows" that the Earth goes around the sun (heliocentrism). "We cannot feel our motion thru space, nor has any experiment ever proved that the Earth is actually in motion", admit Einstein's leading disciples. Invoked proofs... are more easily and comprehensively explained by the entire universe rotating about the Earth every 24 hours. No experiment has ever been performed with such excruciating persistence and meticulous precision, and in every conceivable manner, than that of trying to detect and measure the motion of the Earth. Yet they have all consistently and continually yielded a velocity for the Earth of exactly zero mph... hundreds of experiments have failed to detect even a smidgen of the purported 67,000 mph translational and 1000 mph rotational velocity of the Earth. Not only can it not be disproved that "the Earth stands forever" (Ecc. 1:4) and has no velocity; it cannot be disproved that the Earth is the center of the universe.

When the cosmographer Rabbi David Gans showed to Tycho Brahe the account in tractate Pesachim of how the sages of Jerusalem yielded to the scholars of Alexandria as to whether the galgalim move and the mazalot are stationary, or v.v., he exclaimed: "Those sages were wrong to submit to the Greeks..." (Nechmad V'Nayim 25). All research confirms the Biblical-Tychonic schema, with the planets of the solar system (except the Earth, which is not a "planet", the word meaning a "wanderer") in epicyclic retinue about the sun, and this coherent unit, plus the whole steller array-- space, and everything in it-- orbiting the Earth and subordinate to it (see Maharal's Be'er HaGola 6)... The authority of Scripture and our sages support the geocentric paradigm (e.g. Rambam's M.T., Y.H. 3; YF: but we don't learn science from Torah, per Rambam & Co.)...

http://israelvisit.co.il/top/Purim.shtml

Waiting for a response from archaeologist.

arnoldo · 03-18-2010, 06:15 PM

Here is an abstract in regard to a geocentric world view held in the Torah.

Quote:

"Geocentrism"
Dr. Avi Rabinowitz

Abstract
Certain biblical passages and a number of statements in the Talmud can be interpreted as implying a geocentric view of the universe. However, a Torah-science conflict around the issue of geocentrism does not in actuality exist. Using Einstein's General Relativity Theory one can show that the geocentric picture of the universe is not less correct that the non-geocentric one.

http://www.borhatorah.org/home/oldco...ntents.html#5E

Keith&Co. · 03-18-2010, 06:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by arnoldo

Here is an abstract in regard to a geocentric world view held in the Torah.

Quote:

"Geocentrism"
Dr. Avi Rabinowitz

Abstract
Certain biblical passages and a number of statements in the Talmud can be interpreted as implying a geocentric view of the universe. However, a Torah-science conflict around the issue of geocentrism does not in actuality exist. Using Einstein's General Relativity Theory one can show that the geocentric picture of the universe is not less correct that the non-geocentric one.

http://www.borhatorah.org/home/oldco...ntents.html#5E

But if the universe is geocentric, that means that the stars circling the Earth are moving faster than light. The distant galaxies far, far faster than the speed of light. Einstein said that was a no-no.
So, you use just enough of Einstein's work to make a case, then ignore the rest?

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