Wayne Delia

Then on what basis did you conclude he was necessarily wrong? That's what you need to answer.

WTF??? Are you referring to me? "Heartburn"? Go ahead and use whatever secondary sources you need in this case. I think you're inventing excuses not to have to back up your own claim.

Why should I have to do your work for you? You've made a claim - that Bishop Ussher's calculated date of creation is wrong. You need to back it up yourself, or retract your claim.

Again, it's not my claim - it's yours. You've got to try to be a little more subtle and less transparent when you're attempting to shift the burden of proof.

WMD

Wayne Delia

Incestual activity? Funny you should mention that! There are a lot of specific prohibitions in the Bible forbidding sex between certain family members, such as a man and his mother, a man and his mother-in-law, etc. - but prohibiting incest between a man and his daughter is omitted. Hmmm..... more Bible family values.

There are some stories in the Bible which make me wonder if the author had an Aunt Mommy, Uncle Daddy, one set of grandparents, and one set of great-grandparents.

WMD

John A. Broussard

So the new rule is to do only those things that Christ did that we can do.

Am I reading you correctly?

John A. Broussard

But people lose limbs every day in automobile accidents. Does that mean we should pray not to lose one every time we get into a car?

This is all very puzzling.

Prayer for a cure is ineffective (or unwarranted) if we didn't pray before hand to avoid that particular illness or injury.

Is that what you are saying?

I'm looking forward to your answer.

Wayne Delia

Actually, what makes Christians different from atheists is a belief in a particular god. You've said that "atheists have figured out the obvious" - that this life is the only one we have. (I can show you your words where you admitted that if you've forgotten it already.) So, any Christian who figures there's an additional life after death would clearly be wrong, according to your line of reasoning.

Wrong. What you conceded was that the atheists have figured out "the obvious" - that this life is the only one we have. You need to stop paraphrasing arguments into something completely different, which you do quite often. Strawman arguments never work, because you're not addressing the actual issue.

Wrong on both counts - badly wrong. I love myself because I have self esteem, which is pretty much disallowed if one should become a Christian. A prospective Christian is required to admit he is a sinner, to confess guilt for arbitrarily-defined sins, to repent, and to continue to grovel to God and to those who appoint themselves as God's representatives. It's particularly bad in the Catholic Church. Hating yourself for imaginary, arbitrary reasons is the first step toward family dysfunction, and I'm very happy to say I don't have that problem.

Further, I love myself, and it is certainly relevant that I love my family. Christians are not permitted to love themselves or their families, according to Jesus in Luke 14:26. I am not a Christian, so I am free to love my family, which I do very much. That capability is very much a relevant difference between me and Christians who are not permitted to love their families if they want to follow Jesus. Did you get confused between the terms "relevant" and "irrelevant"?

WMDWMD

Wayne Delia

I'm not so sure it's an example of "tarring" with a broad brush. Eating and drinking are required to sustain life, and there's certainly nothing wrong with being merry, for reasons I discussed in my previous post. The thing is that Christians have been brainwashed into thinking that being merry is a very bad thing. Obviously, that assumption is not presumed to be true by both sides of the debate.

Quite often, Christians see issues in extreme, absolute, black-or-white choices, with no middle ground. One such absolute position is the Bible is either all true, or all false - nowhere in between. Clearly, there is some ordinary factual information in the Bible - say, for example, that the capital city of Israel is Jerusalem, or some obscure names in a lineage could actually be true. Most, if not all, of the supernatural, metaphysical, paranormal shit is either wrong or unfalsifiable, of course. Bram Stoker's Dracula is a good illustration: it can't be said to be all true or all false, but the presence of accurate information about sixteenth-century Eastern Europe does not imply that vampires exist.

WMD

Wayne Delia

That's as wrong as you could possibly get on that observation. The scientific method does not concern itself with the Bible at all, nor does it regulate the behavior of scientists. That's nothing more than "sour grapes" that the claims of the Bible are routinely refuted by new scientific discoveries. For example, we now know how the annual compressed layers are formed in the Antarctic ice cap, and that the thickness of the annual layers are directly proportional to the amount of precipitation received in the corresponding year. Very cool tool, those polar ice core samples: we can predict that a certain amount of precipitation will produce a certain annual thickness, and it works. But the evidence from polar ice core samples refutes certain widely-held Bible beliefs. For one thing, the earth is much older than what the young-earth creationists think, and another thing, nothing even remotely like Noah's Flood shows up in the annual precipitation record for more than the past hundred thousand years or so. It's just normal yearly precipitation which varies by no more than the usual standard deviations, no evidence of a worldwide flood.

In the face of those scientific refutations, with physical, tangible evidence and reliable, repeatable experiments - which do not depend on any necessary presupposed beliefs of scientists in order to work - your only comment is that it's all a big coverup conspiracy to suppress the (unsupported) "truth" in the Bible. That's simply mind-boggling.

WMD

Wayne Delia

If that's what we established, then we've also established Jesus lied, or was horribly mistaken, in Mark 11:22-24 (that a faithful Christian will get anything he asks for in prayer) and, to a lesser extent, Mark 16:17-18 (that a Christian will be able to cure any illness, simply by laying on of hands,

No, that's not our conclusion at all. Rather, our conclusion is that which Jesus promised flat out doesn't work. Whether that's because God doesn't exist, or Jesus is a compulsive liar, or if Jesus was really exaggerating to make a point, or if no Christian has enough faith to qualify for those abilities doesn't really matter, it's just that the abilities don't deliver what is promised.

WMD

Amaleq13

This thread has moved far away from BC&H material so I'm closing it down. If anyone feels it should be kept alive somewhere else, I'll open it and move it.

Amaleq13, BC&H moderator