punta

well i thought some of the omen watchers at another sight i sometimes post at as "fiver" would find Cydonia's "Mark of the Beast 9.5 or higher" info interesting so i posted the chip link here:

responses to "Mark of the Beast?"

of particular interest was this response with the preamble "This comment is not just for Fiver but to other atheists or agnostics."

i have never even claimed to be an atheist or agnostic or anything. i simply do not accept the Christian Bible as the divine word of any God.

i was going to take the high road and ignore it (even if it is ignorant and arrogant). do you think i should respond? what would you say?
ideas?

respectfully, punta

Mageth

To such a farfetched post from a totally credulous, ignorant "believer," I don't think anything you say will actually make an impression.

punta

Mageth,

that's kind of what i thought but that board only has one atheist and an infrequent poster at that. if i don't respond, probably no-one will.

the eternal question: to speak out against idiocy knowing it will have no effect, or to allow it to fester unopposed...

thanx for responding.

lpetrich

I'll entertain myself by picking it a part.

This comment is not just for Fiver but to other atheists or agnostics. Why is that bible prophecies have been fulfilled and are being fulfilled right before our very eyes but yet people live in denial.

The whole subject of Biblical prophecies is discussed in <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/prophecy.html" target="_blank">the Biblical Prophecy section</a> of this site.

For example how did one of the prophets(Daniel or EZekiel) accurately prophecy about King Cyrus about 200 years before he was born unless he had supernatural intervention?

The Book of Daniel is generally thought to have been written around 300 BCE, making its "prophecies" recent history, and then backdated a few centuries.

Since you all put your faith in science,did you know there is scientific proof of a universal flood and the crossing of the REd Sea.

The story of Noah's Flood may have been inspired by some local floods, but a planetwide flood simply has never happened, at least in the time that the Earth has had a good geological record. One good collection of rebuttals is at <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org</a> Some examples:

It is possible to put together a chronology of tree-ring variations from living and dead trees in some spot by looking for overlaps -- which means that some of the trees had been alive at the same time. Researchers have succeeded in assembling tree-ring sequences that extend back 9000 years, meaning that trees in the southwest US, in Ireland, and in Germany have been alive and growing all that time without anything really catastrophic happening to them.

Likewise, the icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica have annual layers -- something like 100,000 of them.

Fossils in rocks indicate that that rock was once underwater, but the rocks are too neatly layered to be a single big flood. Instead, the rocks formed in continental shelves and lake beds from sediment washed in from rivers, trapping seashells and bones and the like.

As to the crossing of the Red Sea, that is probably pure mythology. There is no evidence of the Israelites (some 2 million of them!) having lived in the Sinai about 1300 BCE or thereabouts, and no evidence of the conquest of Canaan.

The bible is not a fairy tale book but a true account of history,geography and absolute moral values.

Some of its contents are certainly correct, but some of it is about as "true" as the Iliad and the Odyssey and similar literature.

And as to moral values, the Bible contradicts itself on several of them. Slaughter entire populations of one's enemies without mercy, including their sheep and cattle? Select out the unmarried women who have not gone to bed with any man? Or love one's enemies and turn the other cheek?

Christians contrary to popular opinion do not have blind faith.
Our faith is based on strong evidences such as the microchips that the bible speaks clearly about. I know it didn't say microchips but you get the idea.

However, here is a lot of stuff on <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/errancy.html" target="_blank">Biblical Errancy</a>

Atheists are the ones with blind faith.
They refuse to accept things that are clearly seen to accept man made theories. They must have a lot of confidence in man.

What things that are clearly seen? And that statement seems rather misanthropic.

It's amazing that they walk away from such factual things concerning the prophecies of Jesus. The very birthplace was predicted long before he arrived.

His Bethlehem birthplace was an invention of the Gospel writers, who wanted Jesus Christ to seem to fulfill various OT prophecies. Even if it meant quoting out of context, as with the virgin-birth "prophecy".

The Israel situation and coming out of gays and lesbians are things that the bible prophecy about.

War has been a favorite Middle Eastern sport for millennia, so what's so special about wars in the Middle East? And I notice that the Bible does not say anything about Palestinian Arabs.

Also, where does it say anything about homosexual people "coming out"?

Yet with all the evidence you still declare that you don't believe.

Because there is much stronger evidence for alternative hypotheses.

YOu would rather accept a world that came from a big bang and formed very complex uniform systems within our universe than to accept a supernatural being that created everything in order.

Divine whim is a non-hypothesis in a certain way: it is not clear what "Goddidit" would not account for, meaning that this hypothesis lacks an important feature of good hypotheses: falsifiability. However, hypotheses of natural laws tend to have much better falsifiability.

Does think make any sense? Out of chaos a beautiful world with a complex solar system and a earth that revolves around a sun and a moon that revolves around an earth. You really believe this was by accident??

5 billion years ago, an interstellar gas+dust cloud collapsed under its own weight; we can still see such collapsing clouds in our neighborhood in the Galaxy. As it collapsed, it collapsed a bit off-center, giving it some angular momentum. As it shrunk, it spun faster and faster, turning into a disk with a big lump in the center. This lump became the Sun, whose shining baked the disk, the inner parts more than the outer parts. Thus, the inner planets, like the Earth, are mostly rocky, while the outer planets and smaller objects are icy and gassy.

As to the Moon, inner-planet formation involved dust colliding to make rocks, and rocks colliding to make bigger and bigger rocks, with the planets being the surviving big rocks. But a Mars-sized rock hit the early Earth, splattering some of its stuff into orbit. This formed a ring around the Earth, which turned into a ring of bigger and bigger rocks, until only one rock was left: the Moon.

Come on now be real with yourselves and stop purposefully ignoring the evidence. Because God didn't suit your expectations of him you choose to reject him. Try sweeping him under the rug,keep on pushing him to the back of your conscience,continue denying strong inner convictions.

Only that agnostics and atheists don't think that way. They don't say, "I know you exist, O Christian God, but I turn my back on you." They consider the Christian God to effectively be fiction, and give the question no further thought.

And that does not cover believers in different religions, who sometimes say that their religions seem very true to them.

I've read of countless scientists who were on a mission to disprove the existence of God and the reliability of the bible but during their research they could do nothing but surrender to God upon the authenticity of the bible.

An apologetic fairy tale; bragging about a formerly sinful life is par for the course.

How long will you live in denial? You need to start asking the right questions and realize that just maybe you are wrong.

After you.

It's even funny when I see nonbelievers calling out God's name.

A rather silly reflex action.

The bottomline is that everywhere you go we are confronted with this being known as God. Stop living in outright rebellion and face the truth of your inward witness. Stop suppressing that faith you have in the supernatural and admit your folly. If you continue to reject the truth no matter what signs or prophecies you see you will always dismiss it as coincidence or find some way to explain it away.

Only that has never happened to me. I've never seen any old man with a big white beard in the sky.

And there are much more straightforward ways to communicate, like send telepathic messages.

And believers in other religions might say the same thing to you, but with reference to different deities.

The funny part about is that the explanations are nothing you came up with but are just silly explanations of scientists who also refuse to believe. Who really has blind faith?

Look in the mirror. And "not wanting to believe" has nothing to do with it, as I have explained.

punta

lpetrich, thankyou very much for your detailed response. i plagiarized you shamelessly... errr...

...put it to good use. hope you approve.

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

not a theist

I think it's actually closer to 165 BCE.

lpetrich

Thanx. That's actually a reasonable date. One indication that this is the case is how it gets the politics of the post-Alexander era essentially correct, while making errors about the Babylonian kings that it mentions.

It would be like some supposedly-prophetic document that is supposedly from the colonial US that gets the politics of recent decades correct, while making elementary blunders about the colonial era. And that uses present-day spellings rather than colonial-era spellings, like -ic instead of -ick.

spin

Ipetrich:
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The Book of Daniel is generally thought to have been written around 300 BCE, making its "prophecies" recent history, and then backdated a few centuries.
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not a theist:
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I think it's actually closer to 165 BCE.
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And I'd say much of Daniel was written in about that year, because it was tied to a specific event, known as the Hellenistic Crisis, when, during the Struggle between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, Jerusalem had passed into the control of the Seleucids, who were more active in their involvement in local affairs. They attempted to "raise" the cultural standards there only to meet opposition by the more conservative and/or pro-Ptolemy parts of the community. They changed the high priest in Jerusalem -- someone had bid a higher taxation payment rate for the job. Then someone overbid him and the quality of priestly leadership in the temple was compromised partly through overtaxation and there was a lot of discontent which led to a revolt, which brought heavy repression by the Seleucids, exacerbating the situation into full rebellion, with the king Antiochus IV banning the Jewish religion and replacing it with an attempt at syncretism. He put a statue of Zeus in the temple -- the is the abomination of desolation talked about in Daniel. He banned all signs of the Jewish religion, the contravention of which brought heavy penalties including crucifixion. Sacrificing to Yahweh stopped. The priesthood fled. This was real persecution. The events improved with the death of the king in 164 BCE. That death is not foreseen, at least as it actually happened, in Daniel. This explains why 165 is taken as the date of composition.

Jack the Bodiless

If this guy believes in the reliability of the inerrant Bible, shouldn't this read "...and a flat Earth beneath a solid firmament traversed by a tiny Sun and Moon?"

Godless Dave

Yes I do. There are billions of stars in our galaxy alone. There are billions upon billions of galaxies in the universe. Recently astronomers have discovered that many stars have planets orbiting around them. Most planets in our solar system have moons orbiting around them, so obviously that in itself is not all that special.

Given the immense size of the universe (which is actually very orderly, and follows well-established laws of physics, so I don't think it's what you mean by "chaos") I don't find it unlikely at all that at least one of those billions of planets orbiting one of those billions of stars happened to be the right size and right distance away from its sun to be hospitable to life.

Punta, you can use this if you want. Not that it will help.