Kaabi

Me and my friend are debating God, the Bible, and Jesus. He's a stone-cold believer, takes the Bible literally, Earth is 5000 years old, creationism, all that. I need some stuff on why the Bible is wrong, scientific backing, some good stuff. I have a lot of philosophy and logic but nothing stone cold, although what I've said is pretty stone cold he just won't accept it. I know you guys are really knowledgeable about this, so give me some stuff! Yes, I'm atheist.

RED DAVE

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...threadid=68469

One good place to start.

RED DAVE

Kaabi

I have no problem reading long things, but that is really long and I don't want to spend much time on this. I'm not exactly an active atheist; sometime maybe I'll read, but can you uhh... compress it?

spin

I'd guess 6011 years old. The date usually touted is from an Irish scholar Bishop Ussher of a few centuries back and he concluded the world began in 4004BCE.

You must remember that the Egyptian culture was in continuous development in the historical period from about 3000BCE and of course a very long time before that.

Arguments based on science usually get responded to with denial for christians who believe 4004BCE don't accept science. I'd recommend that you wash your hands of young creationists as they aren't able to be logical about the matter.


spin

hatsoff

Welcome to the boards!

I think you're approaching this the wrong way. It seems like you've already decided on the issue, and you're looking for evidence to support your conclusion. However, the proper way to seek the truth is to set aside your presuppositions and let the evidence take you where it leads, even if it is in a different direction than you first expected.

That said, I can assure you that young-earth creationism is quite incompatible with reality. The earth is about 4.55 billion years old, and we did indeed evolve from a common biological ancestor. For more information on this, I suggest visiting the talk.origins archive.

As for the Bible, it is important to distinguish between its individual books. Christians often claim that the Bible somehow proves itself by its consistency and agreement, but this is simply a naive and ultimately untrue perspective. The book of James, for instance, is in complete disagreement with the Pauline theology of Romans, 1-2 Corinthians and Galatians, concerning the importance of works righteousness. Matthew, Luke and 1 Chronicles all contradict each other in their genealogies. Perhaps more importantly, the authors traditionally ascribed to more than half the books in the New Testament did not, as it turns out, write those books. Namely, the Gospels of Matthew and John were not written by the Apostles, nor any other eyewitness; 1 and 2 Peter were not authored by Peter. In fact, we can only be reasonably sure about the authenticity of seven books, all of them written by Paul, who wasn't an eyewitness to Jesus (unless you count his experience on the road to Damascus, which is an obvious invention).

The early Christian world was truly rife with forgery and false ascription to otherwise anonymous works. Even Christians reject the authenticity of such volumes as the Gospels of Peter, Thomas and Nicodemus. Works such as the epistle of Barnabas, Didache, Apocalypse of Peter and the Shepherd of Hermas were all widely used in the first few centuries AD, but eventually rejected as the Roman Catholic Church grew in power. The process of canonization was slow and somewhat haphazard, with the final New Testament roster as we know it today being formed in the fourth century--and even then it took time to be standardized.

One factoid Christians are fond of pointing out is that the New Testament is more textually reliable than any other ancient work. While this view, like much apologetics, overlooks the Bible's composite nature, it is more or less true at its core. However, the common aim of presenting this claim is to prove that the Bible is textually trustworthy, and that is simply not the case. For starters, though the New Testament is fairly accurate, textually speaking, the Old Testament is highly suspect; some of its content cannot be found in any manuscript prior to the tenth century AD, well over a thousand years after its last book was completed. More to the point, just because the New Testament is more accurate than other ancient works does not mean it is anywhere near perfectly accurate. Christians seem to enjoy citing various statistics which give false impressions of reliability; you may hear that the New Testament is 99% textually accurate. Of course, such numbers are highly arbitrary and in some cases plainly wrong. The New Testament suffers corruption from transmission, just like any ancient text. Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:12, for example, have been identified as later interpolations which were not originally part of their host works. Many other such additions have been identified, but who knows how many have escaped detection? No, the textual integrity of the New Testament is highly questionable.

Even thought what I've written here is accepted by most historians and verifiable through hard evidence, you must not expect your "stone cold" believer friend to be swayed. He will resist you at every turn, clinging to his religious beliefs for dear life. The best plausible outcome here is that he listens to you and absorbs the information to be processed at a later time, when he is more amiable to changing his belief system; however, even that is unlikely to happen. In all probability he'll just dig in his heels and find any excuse to reject what you have to say. So please be aware.

To gather evidence for the above summation, I would look to the following sites:
religion-online.org (particularly the two Introductions to the New Testament)
earlychristianwritings.com
wikipedia.com (be careful of this one; it has a tendency to be inaccurate, though it is quite useful as a reference tool)
infidels.org
bible.org (particularly the articles by Daniel Wallace; though he has a strong Christian bias he does a good job of presenting both sides of the evidence accurately)
...and, of course...
google.com

Good luck with your debates!

Amedeo

The amount of available criticism is overwhelming. I suggest you do NOT try to show him to be in the wrong. Ask him to explain to EXACTLY what he believes in the two Testaments? Did you say EVERTHING and LITERALLY? Good, now give him some projects of Bible study so that he may inform you exactly what he believes. Here are a few projects:

-- Read Genesis Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. In Ch. 1, the Elohim [the gods; the deity; god -- in translation] created man in THEIR own Image, EXPLICITLY one MALE, and the other FEMALE. Does it mean that the Elohim [the Gods) were a male and a female, or were they talking stupidly?

-- In Chap. 2, God, that is Yahweh, unmarried, produced Man out of dust, and after creating some more animals, He extracted Eve from his ribs.
The Elohim create by saying words, like a magician does. Yahwh operates more like an architect and a sculptor, and did some tree-planting, too.

Ask, Which God do you believe in? If you accept the Bible as truth, you must believe in that divine family of magicians as well as in Yah; in the different ways in which men and women came in to being, etc. etc.

-- Yahweh created Man, stars, trees, beasts of burden and other specialized animals. All creature were FULLY_FORMED, not infants that grew into adults. Adam and Eve were endowed with understanding and with language. In fact, Eve and the crafty Serpent carried on a nice conversation. God gave speech to not only Eve but also non-human animals. The Serpent was deviously intelligent and spoke. The human species continues from Adam and Eve. What happened to the generation of talking intelligent Serpents? The Bible has also, later on the Nephilim, the Giants (of other mythologies); they were never created by Yahweh.Obviously there used to be other creators besides Yahweh, but unlike the Elohim, they are not reported in the Bible. So, the Bible can't really be THE book of Truth, when it omits such important creations as the Giants (and Titans of Greek mythology).
[Let him tell you about Gabri-El, Satana-El, Michae-El and the other archangels of El, the male of the Elohim. who were also the ministers of the Canaanite El and his divine spouse. Ask him about all the Gods in Genesis 1 and 2, and the same gods who appear in the writings at Ugarit and Ebla, even before the Bible started to be composed (orally)./ Ask him whether the Commandments written by God and given to Mose were written in Egyptian, where Moses grew and learned, or in the Hebrew which no Hebrew had yet learned to write or read.... Who exactly told the story of the WRITTEN Commandments?]

--Cain and Abel, children of Adam and Eve, may have been born as infants,, but we know that in their adult life, they were respectively engaged in farming and in shepherding. So! They lived some 5000 years ago, while we know that agriculture was created by the Sumerians some 8,000 years ago or more. So, the Biblical earliest humans were humans at the time of the Bible story-tellings. The story tellers knew humans engaged in agriculture, in shepheding, in merchandizing, etc. These are not the earliest, HISTORICAL human beings. The Bible is not a history book of mankind....

-- This questioning, I assure you, can go on for months, .... if you want to figuratively burn the Bible as a book or errors, misunderstanding, and misinterpretations.

Now, ask the man to read his Gospels...

-- Eastern kings got a hint that a new king was born... You know the story: King Herod received information from them and, fearing for his throne, he ordered the massacre of the innocents. But Jose and Mary were warned by angels and fled into Egypt. Then, as we know from other sources, king Herod died around 4. B.C. (by the Christian calendar). So, Jesus was born in or before 4. B.C. {Let him figure out what happened.)

-- Two Gospels give genealogies to prove that Jesus, the son of Joseph, was of the bloodline of King David. They insist Jesus was royalty but, for some unknown reason, nothing is said in the Gospels of Jesus the King between the flight into Egypt and the crucifixion of "Jesus of Nazareth King of the Judeans." When you read St. Paul, you learn that Jesus died to atone for the sins of the world; that is, he removed the crucifixion from the royalty context, so that practically nothing (in the history of the Christians) is left of Jesus the King, except the nice fable of the magi bearing gifts and of the star hovering over the manger in Bethlehem!

-- On the contrary, most of the Gospels speak of Jesus the Messiah, who came to save Israel as the end of the world was approaching -- in fact, within one generation. That was Jesus's prediction. As It did not occur, he was a false prophet, even though the followerd have a dozen explanation to get aroun what Jesus said... and to even set new dates, like the year 1000, 2000 (as even Falwell asserted), and other dates in the 19th century (by American evangelists).

-- The biography of Jesus the messiah is quite interesting. The texts always says that this or that happened IN ODER THAT THE SCRIPTURES MIGHT BE FULFILLED. So, for example, he was born of a maiden, impregnated by the power of God (as angels reported to Joseph). Jesus always spoke of his divine father and basically did not recognize Joseph. But then as the son of Mary and God, Jesus was not of the bloodline of David. So the Gosples are the blend of TWO biographies: that of the royal Jesus and that of the messianic Jesus.

-- The messianic Jesus was born in Bethlehem, BECAUSE he was so foretold. Was he born there, or did he (or the Gospel narrator) SAY that he was born there? Anyway, Joseph and Mary went there for the Roman census, which apparently required people to register in their birthplace. Bethl. is then surmised to be the birthplace of Joseph, even thou he had moved to Nazareth, in Galilee. {At the most, heads of households would be required to register.} Apparently the Census occurred around 6 A.D. So, Jesus the Messiah was born some 10 or more years after Jesus the king.

-- Various scriptural anecdoted about Jesus, such as the devil's temptations and his being taken on top of buildings and hills, must have been narrated by Jesus himself, since they are events without witnesses (of even gospel personnel).

--Jesus must have told his audiences a lot about himself, since he modeled himself after the messiah he knew from Scriptures. (He was a learned rabbi.) The stories of his miracle-workings may be a case in point. Very often he was not believed [for he always demanded FAITH in him, in his word... and chided the doubting Thomas]. In the Gospel of John, we find Jesus complaining to his brother that people did not believe him. His brother said: If you REALLY do the things that YOU SAY you do, go to Jerusalem for the Passover and do them in front of the crowds! {They will believe you} But Jesus never gave any evidence that he performed miracles; he told stories about himself performing miracles.

So, Jesus the messiah was a delusional fraud....

Kaabi

Wow this is all some grade-A stuff. I'm printing it out. Now, he gave me some papers. One of them did have that thing about it being 99% textually accurate, and I have something else I want to type here, soon, but I have to get it.

Cheerful Charlie

Google for Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason to start.

Cheerful Charlie

Malachi151

I second this:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/sp...geofreason.htm

You can find a link to the whole text at the bottom of that page.

Also, my article on Jesus mythicism, even if you don't agree with the final conclusion, it exposes a lot of the idiocy of the Jesus story, the symbolism, etc.

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar...th_history.htm

-Jay-

I'd suggest having a look at the sticky thread at the top of the forum, here, if you haven't already, and make sure you have a good handle on the material that you want to discuss.

In all probability, launching a full-frontal assault on someone's deeply held belief system will get you precisely nowhere - you're arguments will likely be dismissed out of hand. (Not to mention it's very difficult to have a respectful full-frontal assault...) You'll probably make more headway by taking some specific points (Amedeo's list looks like an excellent place to start) and working through those - focus on the differences in the Nativity accounts, for example.

You could also make a project out of learning about the formation of the NT canon. It was a much more complex process than most people realize, and it tends to refute apologetic claimes of internal consistency and harmony. (the late Bruce Metzger did very good work in this area, as does Bart Ehrman.)

Hatsoff made a very good point about swaying your friend. It's important to manage your own expectations here, and be patient and respectful. Belief systems typically don't change overnight or as the result of one piece of information.

Welcome and good luck!

regards,

NinJay