StaticAge

Dont you think that is a rather arrogant and presumptuos way of seeing it? In a hundred years or so, will ideas currently held as fact remain so, and if not, does that mean we are all insane and ridiculous? I assume there is usually at least some sort of logical or reasonable merit to ideas and stories told in different clutures, even if I at first dont understand them, because humans have a general desire to arrive at reasonable conclusions. There is a woman who did research concerning fossils in ancient Greece and put forth the theory that much of the mythologies from ancient Greece were based on tales surrounding what these old bones were from, for instance.

funinspace

My favorite explanation (courtesy of jdlongmire) is a time bubble around Judea for the event much like many SciFi constructs. Since the typical Christian considers God to be outside of time, this actually works pretty well, though still very speculative. And it really doesn’t do damage to the cannon. I can see no way to really refute this notion. And it takes care of all the other Empires never noticing the event.

John A. Broussard

Good point. I'll accept this possibility, once the bible is on the fiction shelf in my library.

I do not claim that Peter Pan's flight abilities are a lie, for the simple reason that there was never any claim that it was true. Since the powers that be continue to claim the bible is truth and not just mere melodrama or poetery, then I feel free to point out lies in the document--since they are.

Anat

And I suppose afterwards God made the sun and moon jump instantly to the places where they were supposed to be, to keep local calendar in synch with that of nearby countries?

LeeBuhrul

It's not that we don't understand it... it's that we undestand it all too well

So my suggestion is arrogant but the expectation to believe in this insane tale because it is presumably from an all powerful deity isn't?

It hasn't been 100 years, it's been several thousand years... we've come a long way you know... we do know it's the earth that moves relative to the sun, we do know the earth isn't flat, we do know... oh hell... forget it what to xian fundies care what we know...

American Humanist

Four wrods: The bible is wrong. The bible here is clearly describing a geocentric view of the universe ("the SUN stopped" on the Earth). This shows that the writers of this story believed in the false geocentric nodel of the cosmos. The bible is a human construct incorporating the flawed human ideas of the times.

StaticAge

I was not at all attempting to say that the bible would be any more believable in 100 years or so, but merely pointing out that knowledge progresses. I was also defending all stories and mythologies from other cultures, not merely the bible. There are current relevant ideas held today that tomorrow will be seen as inferior, in physics, mathematics, politics, behavioral science etc. Your arrogance is in appearing to assume that this is due to a lack of mental prowess or reasoning, as if the people of tomorrow arrive at their new discoveries because they are more intelligent than the present, or that people from the past were less intelligent than we are now. To put forth this superior attitude, as though people who believe other than you do are unreasoning, insane, etc, is no more than a masked attempt to marginalize them or their cultures by saying they are/were credulous or gullible or mentally inferior, as if to say that if their thinking faculties were more up to par, they would have no choice but to see things your way.

I am not a christian fundamentalist either, thank you.

Toto

Static: No one is saying that people 2000 years ago who thought that the earth was flat and the sun could just stop in its tracks were stupid or deluded.

But people today who think that the Bible must have been a true record of what happened because some one told them that God wrote it have some explaining to do.

John A. Broussard

Exactly. And that is a crucial point. Should some strange prophetic characters come along and claim that contemporary science ideas are inerrant, then coming generations (with increased knowledge contradicting current beliefs) would be completely justified in considering those characters to be idiots--or, at the least, misguided.

Chili

This was a nice answer.

If eternal time is known only in our right brain it is conceivable that eternal light is only known in our right brain. The problem is how do you shut your left brain off to see that light.

. . . but we know that rational and irrational exist in the left brain. Now if only we could comprehend that non-rational exists in the right brain from where reason is extracted to be the light and darkness of our common day.