dk

• dk: ... I’ve tried to explain Exodus is an historical book, therefore needs to be interpreted within the context of Salvation History. ...
  lpetrich: Whatever "salvation history" is supposed to mean here.
  dk: Salvation history interprets events from a spiritual basis, like secular history interprets events from a material basis.
  o
• dk: ... From an atheistic or agnostic perspective the only rational basis for inalienable human rights must be evolution.
  lpetrich: Once again, O dk, "evolution" is not some grandiose policy prescription, some great mirror image of Catholic dogma.
  dk: .Catholic means universal, so are you inferring evolution to be a localized event, processes or explanation?
  o
• dk: I know what Kangas claimed to disprove, but the best proof for the dogma of the OT Bible is the Jews that have persevered, prospered, migrated and populated the earth by holding fast to God’s Covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham and David. ...
  lpetrich: Except that Jews have never been a very abundant ethnicity, and they have lived scattered about in other nations' territories for ~2000 years.
  Jewish ethnicity has survived by Jews being very cliquey and having various distinctive practices. In fact, there is a long-running Jewish tradition of discouraging converts; this has kept the various Jewish communities from becoming diluted.
  And is dk about to convert to Judaism or something?
  dk: Hey, I have some Jewish timber in the old wood pile. I do agree Judaism yields a closed perspective until the Messiah. That brings us to the NT.
  o
• (some of the difficulties of doing body counts...)
  dk: Even today, it took months to get an accurate body count for the WTC. The original estimates ranged from 10,000 to 20,000, but it wasn’t until months later that the count was verified around 2,600. That’s a 75-90% error rate. It makes a big difference.
  lpetrich: Except that it's rather difficult to do a precise body count when the bodies have been mangled by collapsing 100-story buildings.
  dk: Garbage in garbage out, so to compare pre with post Twentieth Century historical periods produces a gross approximation. We should be able to agree that the 20th Century was marked by great progress and great wars. Any thesis that equates progress to morality, justifies progress at the expense of morality. Fanatics like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao disregard morality to justify progress; whereas petty dictators overlook morality to enrich themselves. Common thieves overlook morality to eek out a degenerate existence. Fornicators, adulteress and rapists, overlook morality to gratify themselves. War embodies a complete breakdown of moral order within a society or nation. Just wars restore a semblance of morality, and unjust wars lead to more unjust wars.
  o
• (on dk and the Black Death...)
  lpetrich: So what? Let us look at the Bible, more specifically, at Deuteronomy 7:1-2:
  When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations--the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you--and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.
  dk: I’m not sure who you have a gripe against. For starters the Canaanite peoples. obviously enslaved, exiled and killed whoever occupied the land before them. Complain all you want about death, but its a fact of life irrespective of what you believe. War is/has/and will always follows a moral breakdown. Just wars are fought with no less viciousness and destruction than degenerative wars. What distinguishes a just from a degenerate war is what follows in peacetime. Deuteronomy was written in response to the Sin of Baal Peor i.e. incursions by the followers of Baal. The point being that Harem Warfare wasn’t what God intended, but a consequence of Israel breaking the Covenants they made with God. Good/evil, virtue/vice and peace/war aren’t about the law but God. From a Christian perspective the OT is about the Law, and that the Law is practical but inadequate. You should take the advice of modern liberals, don’t be so closed minded.
  o
• lpetrich: In other words, genocide -- the Final Solution of the Canaanite Question.
  dk: There has been no final solution to the Canaanite question. In fact you might want to flip ahead to the Book of Ruth, she was a Canaanite women whose lineage became King David and Jesus Christ. For context read Ezekiel 16:3-15. .God didn’t intend genocide for Cane or his children, or instead of sending Cane into exile with his mark for protection, God would simply have killed him putting an end to his line before it began.

dk

I'll read the article but I need a link. You do realize archeologists have eaten a lot of crow in the last 50 years claiming to have disproved the OT, only to find they have not only confirmed the Biblical history but their own bias. But obviously the farther in history we go back, the more sparse the facts, and the wilder the speculation. In fact there is no scholarly consensus on the matter, so we are spinning our wheels.

Ion

All of your concerns are being taken into account, when archaeologists are reported in that article, as saying that Exodus didn't happen.

I looked on the LA Times site, and the article is not there anylonger.

I have it on hard copy.

So:
Exodus didn't happen.

Likewise for Genesis, the flood, Jesus the miracle worker, and so on.

You waste your human rights beliefs, on Biblical fiction motivated by superstitions.

dk

I'll take these as statements as dogma. Why do you forfeit human rights to evolution?

Ion

Take these statements as dogma, if you want:
it's your choice in how you spend your life.

Me, I take the statement I read:

"The truth is that every modern archaeologist who has investigated the story of Exodus, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."

as historically disproving the Exodus' account.

Therefore, Exodus 21:4 and 21:6 are also nil.

Then, the corresponding and opposite to Exodus, Article 4 and 5 in the UN Code of Human Rights, are winning based on observed evolution in human history.

lpetrich

dk : A less sensational but more accurate headline would read, ?Scholars Dispute the Exodus Story?. The archaeological, geographic and geological record for the period is sparse and disputed, so it should surprise no one that several conflicted theories have been presented by scholars. I?m told that?s how science works.

However, some things are clear, like the lack of clear evidence for a huge population of wanderers in the Sinai at about 1200 BCE. Even that triumphant-genocide Conquest seems to be mostly fictional.

dk : (a lot of Jewish evangelism deleted)... Hey, science confirmed the lineage with DNA, from The Cohanim to Ancient Israel. The evidence is more than the prophetic, it is empirical, compelling and vivid. ...

And how is that supposed to be demonstrated? Did anyone ever find any corpses of some of these Kohanim gentlemen?

(dk on OT guys finding fault with various monarchs...)

Except that that is not carried as far as it is in Europe -- Rome had its Republic and Greece had invented a limited form of democracy.

dk : ... I?ve tried to explain Exodus is an historical book, therefore needs to be interpreted within the context of Salvation History. ...
lpetrich : Whatever "salvation history" is supposed to mean here.
dk : Salvation history interprets events from a spiritual basis, like secular history interprets events from a material basis.

Seems more like special pleading to me.

dk : ... From an atheistic or agnostic perspective the only rational basis for inalienable human rights must be evolution.
lpetrich : Once again, O dk, "evolution" is not some grandiose policy prescription, some great mirror image of Catholic dogma.
dk : .Catholic means universal, so are you inferring evolution to be a localized event, processes or explanation?

Of course not. And the idea of biological evolution is description, not prescription. O dk, why don't you study some evolutionary biology some time? So at least you will know what you are talking about. Try some site such as the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

dk : ... We should be able to agree that the 20th Century was marked by great progress and great wars. ...

As if previous centuries have never had big wars. And I mean big in RELATIVE size, since there weren't as many people to kill in past centuries.

lpetrich : So what? Let us look at the Bible, more specifically, at Deuteronomy 7:1-2: (which commands genocide...)
dk : I?m not sure who you have a gripe against. For starters the Canaanite peoples. obviously enslaved, exiled and killed whoever occupied the land before them.

So it was completely OK to perform genocide on them? And was it OK for the Nazis to perform genocide on the Jews on account of what was related in the OT?

dk : Complain all you want about death, but its a fact of life irrespective of what you believe. ...

So murder is OK because death is a "fact of life"? Including mass murder, genocide, ... ?

dk : Deuteronomy was written in response to the Sin of Baal Peor i.e. incursions by the followers of Baal. ...

Whatever "sin" was that. Considering the writers of the Bible an authority on Baal worship is much like considering Jack Chick an authority on Catholicism.

lpetrich : In other words, genocide -- the Final Solution of the Canaanite Question.
dk : There has been no final solution to the Canaanite question. In fact you might want to flip ahead to the Book of Ruth, she was a Canaanite women whose lineage became King David and Jesus Christ. ...

No, a Moabite. And that book is pure fiction, intended to suggest that Moabites are not absolutely subhuman and beyond redemption.

dk

o

• Dominus Paradoxum: If religion and the "nuclear family" are so important to education, then why are european schools doing so well without them?
  dk: Why do you say European schools are doing so well?
  o
• dk: Education in a free democracy rests on the concept that people with good values naturally become good citizens.
  Dominus Paradoxum: Good values, eh? Would those values include the dogmas of a certain book which teaches that all religions except one really worship satan, which condones slavery and the slaughter of Caananite men, women, and childeren by the Israelites; and which proclaims (according to Paul) that the soul of each and every human being is born wicked and depraved, because the Lord your God creates them that way, when he could very well (being omnipotent) choose to create them free of sin? And would this be the same book which recomends (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) that disobediant children should be brought to the city gate and stoned to death? Yes, what a pity that our country's children are being deprived of such an upright moral education
  dk: I’m not sure why the preoccupation with Exodus but I would agree the route is up for grabs from the perspective of secular archaeologists. OT scholars have to deal with dogma and doctrine, dogma being the immutable facts and doctrine conforming to the secular history. The doctrine may change over time, but not the dogma. A serious challenge to the OT requires positive evidence against dogma. As an analogy, some archeologists think aliens built the pyramids because Ancient Egypt lacked the technology. Likewise the Bible exists, even if secular archeologists can explain how it came to exist. The point is that the acts and miracles of Moses are dogma, and the route Israel traveled in Exodus is doctrine. Doctrine changes when interpreted correctly by new scientific facts. Dogma never changes. You and Ion need to find a good Catholic theologian to put the Pentateuch into context. You seem incapable of discerning the difference between dogma and doctrine.
  With respect to divorce, harem warfare, and slavery they are all wrong, but worse things exist. In fact between slavery and divorce I would argue divorce has had a more degenerative effect upon post modern culture than slavery. For example to drain the swamps around New Orleans in the 19th Century Irish immigrants were employed because the mortality rate exceeded 50%. Slaves represented a sizeable capital investment, whereas Irish immigrants, being freeman, provided a cheap commodity. The point being that forced labor constitutes a greater evil than slavery. If you want to go toe to toe on this issue lets move to another format. As for Satan, tradition holds he’s a fallen angel but was created good, and ditto for the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. So in a sense worshiping false gods is Satan worship. On the other hand a Moslem or pagan might know God by another name, and God being eternal remains immutable.

Ion

I am from Romania, I studied Engineering in France, and I am in demand here because the French Engineering system produces Engineers whose education emphasizes mathematical algorithms (think of the strength of French mathematicians in science), and is also well rounded in physics, foreign languages, geography, etc.
Like I wrote:

Exodus is in the Bible;

Exodus is disproven by archaeologists;

thus, the Bible is disproven there.

lpetrich

Also, Exodus contains a lot of laws, including two versions of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20 and Ex. 23; a third version, Deut. 6, closely parallels Ex. 20). The 10-C groupies seem to think that those are the only laws one will ever need, to the point of making the rest of the Bible superfluous.

And as to Biblical laws, my favorite one is Ex. 20:26, which states that one must not climb up upon an altar, because if one does, one would expose oneself to it.

Ion

I checked this.

Indeed.

There is no such a concern -either way- in the UN Code of Human Rights.

The 'God' from the Bible must be a goof.