PoodleLovinPessimist

complete speculation
not even cheap inference:
The Christian Bible

Plognark

And i'm tired of theists asserting that it's somehow a perfect account, when it clearly is nothing of the sort. It doesn't even appraoch a 50% acuracy rate, and it make some heinous errors, and displays no degree of knowledge beyond what the people at the time already knew.

Monad

Well yes - good. I agree it's reasonable (as a mental health practitioner myself I should know). I just wanted to make sure that no-one was taking TBT's totally malicious complaint seriously.

Roland98

I am not referring to anyone in particular--these threads just have a tendency to degenerate into shit-flinging matches directed at users rather than whatever topic it is that's under discussion, generally ending up locked. This one has several posts traveling down that same road.

Plognark

Well, how about something REALLLLLLLLLLY simple like getting the formation of the stars and moon and sun in the right bloody order? Or the proper emergence of different categories of living creatures? That would be a start.

Plognark

Dude, seriously, this would go much better if you could generally avoid that kind of post.

It's not too late to just chill out and have some reasonable discussion :huh:

Hopeful Monsters

The man-breathed Bible fails to mention dinosaurs because the men who concocted its fantasies were in utter ignorance of this, as well as the Earth's age, the dynamics of the Solar System, the nature of the cosmos, the most basic physics etc etc etc.Yeah, The Ancient Greeks ―

Archaic Period (750 - 500 BC)

Classical Period (500-336 BC)

Hellenistic Period (336-146 BC)

― built all that knowledge, philosophy, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, proto-science, analytical enquiry, moral and ethical outlook, early engineering principles etc etc etc on a revelation to them of The Old Testament, didn't they?

In truth, the Ancient Greeks were for the most part way ahead of the men who heaped all their superstitious ignorance and obsessions into The Old Testament.

Celsus

Nonsense (or rather, test us {Edited}). I'm saying your translation is wrong, period, not merely "lost in translation". You need to look at spin's post and respond to it. If you want to maintain some sort of chronological harmony with current cosmological theories, then you better be damn sure what tenses those verbs use (which you have completely muddled). You would also do well to learn some of the linguistic affinities between the Genesis materials, and the Ugaritic corpus because that speaks volumes about the connotations earlier Hebrew words would have had, prior to the time we find them in the 1st century BCE. You could also, like me, try to learn Hebrew for yourself and see whether in fact your translations say what they say they say. Some key words for Genesis 1 are bereshit, tehom, tanninim, and raqia. Figure out what they meant to the ancient Hebrews, how certain Ugaritic texts used those terms, and what the Sumerian writings say; don't tell us what they mean to you.

Joel

cjack

See, here's the thing...

For all those billions of years, there wasn't "nothing" happening. Geologically speaking, there was quite a bit more going on in the early history of the Earth than there is today. Biologically speaking, maybe a billion years of algae doesn't do much for you, but hey...who are you to question how God made stuff evolve?


From the Cambrian onwards, there was a whole lot of really, really amazing stuff happening. Maybe not interesting to someone willfully ignorant of anything prior to the writing of Genesis, but amazing to the rest of us. Millions of species evolving, dominating the food chain for millions of years, being wiped out by planetwide catastrophes, followed by millions of new species evolving to fill the gaps...on the whole, I'd consider the history of this planet prior to the arrival of man as at least equally fascinating as the history since.

As I mentioned before, people 4,000 years ago weren't any less intelligent than people today. Had God bothered to dictate an accurate account of pre-historic events to Moses, most folks would have been able to handle it.

For example, I was re-watching Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" last night...Episode 2 "One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue." In it, Sagan spells out - in simple, elegant, and wholly understandable terms - the evolution of life on this planet. He used a simple "cosmic calendar" to explain the time scale involved, and somehow managed to fit it all into an hour long television program that has been seen (and understood) by something like a billion people.

Now, if Sagan can take complicated science and communicate it so effectively to so many people, why couldn't God?

Crowley

I am very unclear where my post required such a comment, much less an appeal to the Moderator. But, I suppose, you have a life time experience of requesting for the intercession of a higher power and could not be expected to break from the habit even here. :devil3:

I apologize for disrupting the flow of the topic.

Couldn't god have passed on the following version of creation:

In the beginning all was of a single oneness. From this oneness God expanded into the void creating the lights in the heavens and the Earth. God caused the Earth to circle the Sun and day and night began. From the fiery cataclysm of its birth the Earth began to cool and waters covered its depths. God separated the waters, forming seas and the land from the receding waters.

To us the substance of the bible is proof that there was no divine inspiration. Where you see accuracy, we see ancient man trying to explain his world according to his cultural beliefs. Where you see divine revelation, we see delusional ignorance on an epic scale.