Jack the Bodiless

Taking off from water is much more difficult than taking off from land. This is especially true for a small creature such as an insect, due to surface tension. Insects such as mosquitoes have solved this problem by never getting wet. They land ON the water, not IN it. Even the young emerge from the larval stage ONTO the surface before flying off.
See above about why you're wrong. Mumbling "metaphorical usage" won't help you. Genesis is quite clear about the demarcation of the creation "days".
Matthew is CLAIMED to be a complete genealogy, as I have already pointed out. It claims to show ALL the generations.

What is KNOWN about these ancient genealogies is that they are FALSE.
No, he did NOT. Lee would have been your ancestor all along, he did not BECOME your ancestor when he was 30 years old. This is pure nonsense.
And murdering a woman's family, then forcing her to marry the murderer, is NOT mistreatment in itself, regardless of whether rape occurs or not?

The Jews did not consider EITHER rape OR forcing female captives to marry the murderers of their families to be "mistreatment".
"Strangers are an unknown factor".

Ed, PLEASE apply a STUPIDITY CHECK to your posts!!!

How bad can a stranger be???

It's BETTER to be definitely raped by those who definitely murdered all your relatives, than to risk the possibility of being raped by somebody else who might be a murderer?

And the barbaric Hebrew society was NOT superior!
The FACTS are that there is no evil at all that you aren't prepared to tolerate and excuse.
Rapists don't generally WANT to attack their victims. They want to HAVE SEX with their victims. A rapist who has a fixation on a particular woman will typically convince himself that "she said no, but she really meant yes". The rapist will convince himself that only her inhibitions are preventing her from really enjoying it, and that he's actually doing her a favor and giving her a good time if she would just relax a little.

The attitude of the rapist is identical to your idiotic belief that women forced to marry the murderers of their families "will eventually be grateful for it".
Scientists know NOTHING about any supposed "cause" of the Universe. There are some highly speculative theories, but no scientific evidence whatsoever for a specific causal agent. Therefore your claim is pure fiction, as usual.
And you are in exactly the same position. Theists have no defense aginst the "brain-in-a-jar" argument. God is irrelevant to this.
No, a subject-object correlation is an inevitable product of the evolution of sensory apparatus and intelligence. And the evidence for evolution can be perceived plainly by atheist and theist alike. It is equally real to both. It's just that some theists have a mental dysfunction which cripples their capacity for rational thought.
Please provide the Aramaic word for "significant" that you claim the translators missed.

If you cannot provide clear evidence that this word was present in the original Aramaic text and omitted during translation: then you have abandoned the Bible yet again.
It was the only SPECIFIED REASON for their deaths.

All other reasons provided by you are fictional.
You are contradicting yourself AGAIN. If your excuse for God punishing the children is "because he knows all the relevant facts regarding the children", then why claim that "children can be punished for the sins of their fathers"?

Is it OK to punish children for the sins of their fathers or not?

Like the Bible itself, you are utterly unable to give a straightforward answer to this question.

Jack the Bodiless

Does anyone here have access to Strong's Concordance?

Let's see what the word translated as "begat" actually means.

Ed, I challenge you to provide any evidence whatsoever that the Hebrews customarily skipped generations in genealogies, that the word "begat" means anything other than "fathered" (or "mothered"), and that ANY culture has EVER used this bizarre "X became the ancestor of Y when he fathered the one destined to become the NEXT ancestor of Y" system.

You have stated these as facts. I say you are lying.

It's time you supported your position.

Bill Snedden

Strong's is available online at several locations. Try crosswalk.com, or zondervan.com, or maybe biblegateway.com

Well, maybe that's a bit strong. Isn't it more likely that Ed is simply mistaken or ignorant?

Hear, hear! And while you're at it, Ed, perhaps you could give us your definitions of "rational" and "conscious"?

Regards,

Bill Snedden
______________
"There is no god higher than truth." Mohandas Gandhi

Ed

Actually you just destroyed your whole argument when you said you dont believe in free will. Without a free will you cannot make a "choice" based on empathy. And in fact you have no basis for presenting any argument at all, since without a free will you cannot weigh arguments and make decisions.

Ed

The biblical understanding of omnipotence does not mean that God can do absolutely anything. He is limited by some things such as logic and his moral character. And there may be other things and situations in the spiritual dimension that we don't know about that limit what exactly he can do in some situations in order to bring about the greatest good which is always His goal.

Ed

No, see my post to tommyc above concerning the biblical understanding of omnipotence.

Ed

The rational basis is the existence of a moral God with an objective moral character and standard. Atheists do not have any such basis. Morality is a matter of preference or subjective pragmatism.

Quote:

jtb: There doesn't appear to be a Biblical basis for condemning Hitler, because he simply did to the Jews what they did to the Amalekites (and in God's name, too).

Fraid so, it is "You shall not murder." The ancient hebrews were God's arm of justice against the Amalekites for what they had done, Hitler killed the jews for who they were, what they had done was irrelevant. Therefore what Hitler did was murder, what God did thru the Israelites was legitimate capital punishment.

Quote:

jtb: But even if we ignore the nasty stuff in the Bible and just use "Jesus wouldn't like it": why is this a RATIONAL reason not to do it? Why, exactly, should any Christian care whether Jesus likes it or not? How is it RATIONAL to care? Because they want to go to Heaven? What is the RATIONAL reason for going to Heaven? Sooner or later, they must acknowledge an EMOTIONAL reason: they WANT something.

No, you are misunderstanding. See above for the rational basis for Christian morality. Christians obey Christ out of love for him, but the difference is that the Christian's emotion has the rational basis mentioned above.

Quote:

jtb: Metaphysical naturalism is superior to Christianity because it provides an entirely rational foundation for the existence of such emotions: they stem from survival mechanisms favored by natural selection. The closest Christianity ever gets to a rational explanation of these emotions is the "imago Dei", or "image of God": we have these emotions because God has them, and we are "made in God's image". There is no explanation of why God has these emotions, or why he chose to build them into us. Furthermore, this collides headlong with the "free will" argument. If God built behavior-constraining emotions into us, there goes "free will". So why didn't he do a better job of programming inmibitions on violence into us, given that he's already scrapped free will anyhow?

Actually human morality is more than emotions. People generally try to live their lives according to what they think is reality. If they think that there is an objective moral standard, ie God's moral character, they are more likely to live according to that standard. On the other hand if they think that morality is just based on subjective feelings then they have a tendency to live their moral lives in a less consistent manner. Their behavior becomes more centered around the self and its emotions, i.e. they do what feels good irregardless of what it does or does not do to others around them. This can eventually be detrimental to society.

winstonjen

If your father commited a capital crime, say mass rape and murder, and I executed you along with your father, would that be a case of 'legitimate capital punishment'? Or what if it was some other poor guy down the road whose father just got sentenced to death? Does that mean that the son can be sentenced to death as well?

scumble

Honestly, it doesn't matter what you say. Anything God does is automatically right, since God is automatically moral. All Christians can do, apparently, is be confused and profess faith a bit, even if their son (for example) dies)

tommyc

Ok, Im sorry for not making my position clear on what I define free-will to be. I believe we all make decisions all the time, we receive information, process it and make choices on that. The difference is that I believe we are just highly complex computers, and we will always make the same decision given the same inputs. i.e. the future is mapped out for us and we have no way of changing it. Think of a computer, it processes information according to a set of rules. it makes decisions, but it will always make the same decisions given the same input.

This actually backs up my argument in saying that there is no morality, because you can't blame anyone for what they do. But this doesn't conflict with the idea of justice and punishment, because of course you can't blame the judge for sending them down either.