Lucretius

So are you now saying that you consider the possibility that the Bible in particular the OT could in fact just be a collection of myths and legends ?

IF that is the case on what basis do you make these Judeao -Christian "primary myths" rather than re-tellings of previous stories and fables from other previous cultures ?
Other than the fact that without this you would have to accept that maybe the atheists are right and there is no God (or gods) that is .

Sawells & Constant Mews

Yes it was pointed out many pages ago that the months=years hypothesis was obvious nonsense but as I said then and will say it again now, I did say it without thinking it through properly (at least I am able to admit I was wrong/silly )

SAWells

[QUOTE=Lucretius;4610373]Hey, no harm no foul you didn't stomp in saying "CLEARLY years means months (sometimes)." You raised the question, we explored the consequences. Fun!

Constant Mews

Dave has been conspicuously silent. My guess would be that he is frantically cutting and pasting AIG material for his debate with me, but I could, of course, be wrong. In the meantime, may we sum up this thread as follows:

Evidence presented for the existence of humans with ~1000 year life-spans - none.

Steviepinhead

Dave has claimed somewhere that he'll be in Mexico for the next week.

Which doesn't necessarily mean he's not furiously searching for his next C'n'Ps...

Minimalist

With any luck he forgot his passport and won't be allowed back in?

shirley knott

Dave's claim was that he was leaving Friday, which I believe is still tomorrow.

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Steviepinhead

That's right, dave: you're not leaving the country until tomorrow! And you'll only be gone a week! And it's just the next country south! So: not like around the world in 80 days, is it?

Just have the wife and kids do your packing, and get right back on this here computer, and start answering some questions (not that you have to answer any particular questions at any particular time, according to the mods, but I'm just saying)--

--when you're only going to be leaving the country for a week starting tomorrow--

--what more important things could you possibly have on your plate than answering our questions?!?

lpetrich

To take a broader view, are they any other mythologies which feature many long-lived people?

The Mesopotamian one of long-lived early kings has a very obvious parallel in the long-lived pre-Flood patriarchs of the first chapters of Genesis. And if anything, the Mesopotamian ones had lived even longer, with the Sumerian King List's pre-Flood kings living 241000 years and Berossus's ones living 432000 years.

Hesiod's metal-age one is much less specific about lifetimes and it does not feature any lineages of leaders as the Mesopotamian and Biblical ones do. Also, neither the Mesopotamian or Biblical ones have the marked-out eras that Hesiod's one does.

So Hesiod's one looks like a separately-invented tradition.


Looking more broadly, I recall someone pointing out that the Bible's history fits into a common pattern of ancient histories:

An era of gods and creation
An era of legendary heroes
An era of ordinary people up to the present

without clear dividing lines between the eras -- each one fades into the next.

One can see this pattern in Livy's History of Rome and in Manetho's Aegyptiaca, and even in China's and Japan's accounts of early history.

Lucretius

I did a bit of research and found out that the George Faber who Dave quoted earlier actually believed that Napoleon the 3rd would fulfill Biblical prophecy and Armegeddon would probably occur sometime after 1864 ,sadly Faber died in 1854 so missed out on being proved conclusively wrong on that count.
The whole book /pamphlet can be read here

http://tinyurl.com/2nnlqr

gregor

Have the odds-makers posted the odds that Dave will return to these boards after his change in latitude? I'll start:

Chance of return:
2-1 against

Chance of return with evidence of long-lived individuals, flood deposits in Egypt, and explanation for post-flud linguistics
200-1 against