Keep searching, it will never reveal everything at once.
Noah's Ark
- Thread starter Mickmeister
- Start date
Keep searching, it will never reveal everything at once.
The Bible does not suggest you close your eyes to life and science and only believe what it says,
but it does not expect you to gobble up everything people say either, to be a pleb to the rumours of the masses.
Things like "the sun will turn into a red dwarf"
And other evolutionary swamp stories.
These were state laws so to speak. The Jewish nation needed laws.
The problem would not have been people who kept these laws, but those who broke them.
The solution of the masses is to ignore morality and then kill anyone who ruins their lives.
Modern society is filled with more dysfunction and violence than any other.
What do those laws say about any citizen that wants to perpetuate those crimes?
A society that does not even have a tendency to reproduce such inebriates, is one that has hope.
It might explain why that nation was continuously attacked by surounding nations who burned their children to their gods.
The laws are harsh, and no doubt there were many miscarriages of justice, and goes to show that whether the laws are strict or loose the problem of inebriates rises continuously.
If there were no criminals, you would not need such a system of penalties.
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I don't like King James at all, or the then Pope, yet they were instrumental in preserving the scriptures, though for political reasons.
Just because Moses was raised by Pharaoh's palace doesn't make him useless, he only happens to be a bain to them later.
You are right on that one.
If I overhear one more conversation on the bus about the sun turning into a red dwarf,
I think I'll lose my temper.
Both I guess, plus myself because I believed such a silly idea.
Speaking of believing silly ideas, do you still think the KJV is virtually word for word as the dead sea scrolls?
Literal interpretation of the Bible as an inerrant document is an absurdity which bases itself upon denial of facts and evidence in the museums and historical sites around the world, as well as the world body of knowledge. Only a person suffering from an egregious thinking error would go to such lengths to preserve their fallacy.
The point of observation is that it's not selective. We don't observe the sun rising every morning only to attribute it to a chariot of fire being drawn across the sky. We integrate the totality of observed facts to formulate our world view. Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton did the best they could with what evidence they had, and collectively they solved the specific cause for the sun's apparent motion. The fallacy comes from throwing observations away, simply dismissing the discoverers as mistaken, or their methods as inaccurate, or the evidence as explainable by some ludicrous fringe idea, such as your rubber earth / cosmic washing machine model.
My point here is that you need only observe the Bible itself as an object worthy of factual study, and all of your literalism fades into the silly self-invention from which it came. You only imagined that the Bible claims itself to be inerrant and that you are commanded by it to read it literally. It says no such thing. The Bible never even refers to "the Bible". It is an collection, not a continuous integrated document. It was assembled -- in the form you claim is accurate -- by order of a pope. Where is your love for the person who assembled your book? You see the problem? All King James did later, via committee, was to remove the Old Testament works done after the incursions of Alexander the Great. Other than that you are reading a book assembled by Catholics according to their faith, not yours. They also cherry-picked from among a scattered collection of writings to compile them into a book.
Therefore "the book" can make no reference to itself anymore than than a random collection of magazine articles compiled into a collection can reference "the book" they are in. The failure to understand this is a serious flaw in the hypothesis of fundamentalism.
There are no autographs and no biographical material to give reference to any writer of the ancient texts. The oldest fragments are very late in terms of the history you refer to, 6000 years before present. As I said before, the tens of thousands of clay tablets recovered from the ancient Mesopotamian and Levant are much older and they reference events that are older than any event in the Bible.
You simply dismiss the work of archaeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, historians and Bible scholars, who collectively agree on the essential facts that thrown in the trash under the fundamental world view. Among the facts that are most fatal to your opinion are the evidence of when the Bible was written -- which is shortly before and shortly after the age of Alexander, the rhetorical evidence of its arrival after a long oral tradition, the laundry list of factual errors it contains*, and the extent of borrowed myth and lore from other cultures.
*such as the error rendering the succession of Persian kings at a time they were supposedly their captives; that is, the story was written much later, after they had forgotten the history
No, that's not even remotely true. What we collectively know, that is, the essential facts that anyone can find by doing research and discovering the extent of corroboration, have nothing to do with belief and everything to do with evidence. You're simply calling evidence "belief" in order to validate your own mistakes.
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Yes, but there are many dead sea scrolls which are not scripture, and these are capitalised on by opposers to prove the Bible wrong.
And by the way, there is nothing in the Bible to suggest men having one less rib, except the original man.
Your comments are the result of studying what others say about the Bible, the scientists, the clergy, the scholars, universities, books, commentaries.
These all have their place, but what about first hand knowledge?
That means reading the KJV yourself - cover to cover. You can read random portions of it as well, if cover to cover is too much.
You keep dismissing the Bible by what others say, what would you think if I only believed what others have said about you?
You need first hand knowledge of it.
II Timothy 3:15 to 17.
Do you think the scrolls were written so "fagots" could capitalise on them?GK said:
Or perhaps you think it's more reasonable to assume they're a written record of some of the events occurring in the Levant around the time of Roman occupation? In which case a scholar wouldn't expect to find that every scroll is about religious teachings. Although you then have to ask why the scrolls were hidden in caves if they weren't about religion or some other aspect of the cultural practices of whoever hid them. Obviously the authors thought what they wrote was important, and whoever hid the scrolls thought hiding them was important.
Why, though? And how many of them are "not scripture"? What does that mean exactly? Does it mean someone wrote a different version of events (or a story about them) than the Biblical version?
If the Bible disagrees with, or doesn't include some of the material in the scrolls, does that mean the scrolls aren't accurate?
Should a written account (the Bible) that has been edited and redacted (I'm sure you know what that word means) several times since the scrolls were hidden, be given more weight than the accounts that haven't been edited or redacted, or even collected into a single volume, for however many centuries it's been?
I'm sure that any scholar worth being called one would think the scrolls are probably a more accurate account of the culture and religion than an account that's been edited several times and had parts removed altogether. I'm sure you will find reason for offense with all this, after all you "believe" the Bible is accurate, factual, a literal truth.
Unfortunately that has to take into account the historical facts: the Bible isn't what it was when it was first collated, it's been altered by men (powerful influential men like kings and popes), presumably for what they believed at the time were eminently good reasons
Skeptics will look for and find endless reasons to discredit the Bible. The majority of the world does the same, so any skeptic has the whole world to back them and give evidence.
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Pope Gregory was a skeptic; he believed the Bible in his day had too much in it, so he 'discredited' certain authors by removing their work from the collation. That pope wasn't the only skeptic however.GK said:
Suppose a modern-day pope decides the Catholic Bible needs an update, or should be abridged so certain "controversial" passages are removed, and this will make it more acceptable?
Say he decides that, since the four gospels in the NT all tell much the same story, the Bible only really needs one gospel: the "true" one.
Maybe you can figure out where this goes. . .
What you are saying sure went on, but in the end we also had the textus receptus, or the received text, which comprised many fragments that the reformers or the common people had. These were pieced together and from that we have most of the New Testament. The Old Testament was always preserved by the Jews.
Ever since the Guttenberg went into print, there have been many inaccurate translations and versions. The modern ones like the NIV are not even scripture, but recommended by the clergy.
The Catholics have always had their own Bible, which is pretty much the same as the KJV, but they also added, rather than subtracted material, in fact they added whole books.
When you say "we had" the textus receptus, you mean "the collaters of the original Bible had" it, don't you? Have you read it? Do you know where it's kept?GK said:
I'm not sure that's accurate: I think the KJV removed whole books (e.g. Ruth) from the Catholic version. The modern Catholic Bible was last edited by Pope Gregory and his clerics, who as stated, removed many books and changed the text in a lot of passages.
If the Bible as it stands is a true account, was the version prior to Gregory's ministry not really a true account that had to be revised? Do you think God communicated this to the Pope, or do you think the Pope decided to do it for other reasons, and what were the reasons?
You'll still find the book of Ruth in the KJV.
I recommend the book "Battle of the Bibles" by H.H.Meyers to get an overview.
The textus receptus comprised of large portions and small portions, from different ages and countries, and not all in the same language either, and these together with the Catholic versions, were used to reconstruct the Bible. It became obvious over time what the Catholics had altered. In the end they did more to preserve it than anything else, even though they made it illegal to have or read a Bible. Many of their own scholars loved the Bible and risked their lives to promote it to the public. But what it contained ended up overthrowing the power of the Papacy and bringing religious liberty.
You are confusing hearsay with exegesis.
By dismissing the wealth of first hand knowledge that comprises all of the world's collective wisdom, and doing so to prop up a nutty opinion, you are demonstrating the fallacy of fundamentalism. It can not exist in the light of day. It withers under the mountain of evidence that proves it ridiculous.
Here is an example of first hand knowledge in action:
These are the first-hand notes of Galileo, as he witnessed each night, through the telescope he invented, what at first appeared to be stars appearing and disappearing near Jupiter. It was then that he realized that these were moons orbiting the planet, and disappearing behind it as they did so. He was arrested and brought to trial for publishing his discovery, in that it repudiated the prevailing opinion, taken from a literal reading of Genesis, that the universe revolved around the Earth, that is, no other object could be a center of anything. He was arrested, nearly executed, and managed to secure a probation under house arrest in return for a public retraction. In a private letter, explaining the problem of denying the facts of nature by a wrong reading of the Bible he famously said:
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.
Here is the full text:
http://www.disf.org/en/documentation/03-Galileo_Cristina.asp
It's yet another work that fits into the enormous body of scholarship that you simply ignore.
A thousand years before King James convened his Anglican Bible committee, the pope appointed Jerome to travel the world and collect all the known manuscripts, since, at that time, no Bible (as you know it) even existed. This was hundreds of years after the Jesus story arose. Therefore your claim that the Bible says the Bible is without error is impossible. There was no Bible (as you know it) until long after the original scattered pieces containing those words were written. The Catholic Chirch put them together. The word "Bible" never appears in the Bible. If you believe it to be sacred then you need to be embracing Catholicism in order to be continuous with the text. They created the word Bible, they chose what to leave in and what to leave out, and the King James committes simply used their list - minus the books they threw out - OT books written after Alexander.
The question here is why you are ignoring the abundance of facts and evidence that were already becoming obvious in the era of Galileo, and how and why you can base it all on your personal opinion of what the history of the Bible was, what the history of the Earth was, and what the current state of human knowledge is. Note, even Galileo would question the fallacy of literalism:
I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands, and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. For the sake of those who deserve to be separated from the herd, it is necessary that wise expositors should produce the true senses of such passages, together with the special reasons for which they were set down in these words. This doctrine is so widespread and so definite with all theologians that it would be superfluous to adduce evidence for it. Hence I think that I may reasonably conclude that whenever the Bible has occasion to speak of any physical conclusion (especially those which are very abstruse and hard to understand), the rule has been observed of avoiding confusion in the minds of the common people which would render them contumacious toward the higher mysteries. Now the Bible, merely to condescend to popular capacity, has not hesitated to obscure some very important pronouncements, attributing to God himself some qualities extremely remote from (and even contrary to) His essence. Who, then, would positively declare that this principle has been set aside, and the Bible has confined itself rigorously to the bare and restricted sense of its words, when speaking but casually of the earth, of water, of the sun, or of any other created thing? Especially in view of the fact that these things in no way concern the primary purpose of the sacred writings, which is the service of God and the salvation of souls—matters infinitely beyond the comprehension of the common people.
You see, it's not enough to simply read KJV cover to cover. You first need to know how to read it, to set yourself apart from the crude and unlearned. That's the real issue here.
You are confusing hearsay with exegesis.
By dismissing the wealth of first hand knowledge that comprises all of the world's collective wisdom, and doing so to prop up a nutty opinion, you are demonstrating the fallacy of fundamentalism. It can not exist in the light of day. It withers under the mountain of evidence that proves it ridiculous.
Here is an example of first hand knowledge in action:
These are the first-hand notes of Galileo, as he witnessed each night, through the telescope he invented, what at first appeared to be stars appearing and disappearing near Jupiter. It was then that he realized that these were moons orbiting the planet, and disappearing behind it as they did so. He was arrested and brought to trial for publishing his discovery, in that it repudiated the prevailing opinion, taken from a literal reading of Genesis, that the universe revolved around the Earth, that is, no other object could be a center of anything. He was arrested, nearly executed, and managed to secure a probation under house arrest in return for a public retraction.
In a private letter, explaining the problem of denying the facts of nature by a wrong reading of the Bible he famously said:
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.
Here is the full text:
http://www.disf.org/en/documentation/03-Galileo_Cristina.asp
It's yet another work that fits into the enormous body of scholarship that you simply ignore.
A thousand years before King James convened his Anglican Bible committee, the pope appointed Jerome to travel the world and collect all the known manuscripts, since, at that time, no Bible (as you know it) even existed. This was hundreds of years after the Jesus story arose. Therefore your claim that the Bible says the Bible is without error is impossible. There was no Bible (as you know it) until long after the original scattered pieces containing those words were written. The Catholic Church put them together. The word "Bible" never appears in the Bible. If you believe it to be sacred then you need to be embracing Catholicism in order to be continuous with the text. They created the word Bible, they chose what to leave in and what to leave out, and the King James committes simply used their list - minus the books they threw out - OT books written after Alexander.
The question here is why you are ignoring the abundance of facts and evidence that were already becoming obvious in the era of Galileo, and how and why you can base it all on your personal opinion of what the history of the Bible was, what the history of the Earth was, and what the current state of human knowledge is. Note, even Galileo would question the fallacy of literalism:
I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands, and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. For the sake of those who deserve to be separated from the herd, it is necessary that wise expositors should produce the true senses of such passages, together with the special reasons for which they were set down in these words. This doctrine is so widespread and so definite with all theologians that it would be superfluous to adduce evidence for it. Hence I think that I may reasonably conclude that whenever the Bible has occasion to speak of any physical conclusion (especially those which are very abstruse and hard to understand), the rule has been observed of avoiding confusion in the minds of the common people which would render them contumacious toward the higher mysteries. Now the Bible, merely to condescend to popular capacity, has not hesitated to obscure some very important pronouncements, attributing to God himself some qualities extremely remote from (and even contrary to) His essence. Who, then, would positively declare that this principle has been set aside, and the Bible has confined itself rigorously to the bare and restricted sense of its words, when speaking but casually of the earth, of water, of the sun, or of any other created thing? Especially in view of the fact that these things in no way concern the primary purpose of the sacred writings, which is the service of God and the salvation of souls—matters infinitely beyond the comprehension of the common people.
You see, it's not enough to simply read KJV cover to cover. You first need to know how to read it, to set yourself apart from the crude and unlearned. That's the real issue here.
You are confusing hearsay with exegesis.
By dismissing the wealth of first hand knowledge that comprises all of the world's collective wisdom, and doing so to prop up a nutty opinion, you are demonstrating the fallacy of fundamentalism. It can not exist in the light of day. It withers under the mountain of evidence that proves it ridiculous.
Here is an example of first hand knowledge in action:
These are the first-hand notes of Galileo, as he witnessed each night, through the telescope he invented, what at first appeared to be stars appearing and disappearing near Jupiter. It was then that he realized that these were moons orbiting the planet, and disappearing behind it as they did so. He was arrested and brought to trial for publishing his discovery, in that it repudiated the prevailing opinion, taken from a literal reading of Genesis, that the universe revolved around the Earth, that is, no other object could be a center of anything. He was arrested, nearly executed, and managed to secure a probation under house arrest in return for a public retraction.
In a private letter, explaining the problem of denying the facts of nature by a wrong reading of the Bible he famously said:
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.
Here is the full text:
http://www.disf.org/en/documentation/03-Galileo_Cristina.asp
It's yet another work that fits into the enormous body of scholarship that you simply ignore.
A thousand years before King James convened his Anglican Bible committee, the pope appointed Jerome to travel the world and collect all the known manuscripts, since, at that time, no Bible (as you know it) even existed. This was hundreds of years after the Jesus story arose. Therefore your claim that the Bible says the Bible is without error is impossible. There was no Bible (as you know it) until long after the original scattered pieces containing those words were written. The Catholic Church put them together. The word "Bible" never appears in the Bible. If you believe it to be sacred then you need to be embracing Catholicism in order to be continuous with the text. They created the word Bible, they chose what to leave in and what to leave out, and the King James committes simply used their list - minus the books they threw out - OT books written after Alexander.
The question here is why you are ignoring the abundance of facts and evidence that were already becoming obvious in the era of Galileo, and how and why you can base it all on your personal opinion of what the history of the Bible was, what the history of the Earth was, and what the current state of human knowledge is. Note, even Galileo would question the fallacy of literalism:
I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth—whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might fall into error. Not only contradictions and propositions far from true might thus be made to appear in the Bible, but even grave heresies and follies. Thus it would be necessary to assign to God feet, hands, and eyes, as well as corporeal and human affections, such as anger, repentance, hatred, and sometimes even the forgetting of things past and ignorance of those to come. These propositions uttered by the Holy Ghost were set down in that manner by the sacred scribes in order to accommodate them to the capacities of the common people, who are rude and unlearned. For the sake of those who deserve to be separated from the herd, it is necessary that wise expositors should produce the true senses of such passages, together with the special reasons for which they were set down in these words. This doctrine is so widespread and so definite with all theologians that it would be superfluous to adduce evidence for it. Hence I think that I may reasonably conclude that whenever the Bible has occasion to speak of any physical conclusion (especially those which are very abstruse and hard to understand), the rule has been observed of avoiding confusion in the minds of the common people which would render them contumacious toward the higher mysteries. Now the Bible, merely to condescend to popular capacity, has not hesitated to obscure some very important pronouncements, attributing to God himself some qualities extremely remote from (and even contrary to) His essence. Who, then, would positively declare that this principle has been set aside, and the Bible has confined itself rigorously to the bare and restricted sense of its words, when speaking but casually of the earth, of water, of the sun, or of any other created thing? Especially in view of the fact that these things in no way concern the primary purpose of the sacred writings, which is the service of God and the salvation of souls—matters infinitely beyond the comprehension of the common people.
You see, it's not enough to simply read KJV cover to cover. You first need to know how to read it, to set yourself apart from the crude and unlearned. That's the real issue here.
It's a long and elaborate way of saying "I have not read it."
Remember it was written for the common man to understand, don't let any institution convince you otherwise.
I note that youve avoided answering my questions about where this "Bible reconstruction material" is being kept, and if you've seen it. Or rather, can I assume that you couldn't read it if you did? And that you accept unquestioningly the provenance and content of this textus receptus because, well, you're religious aren't you?Gerhard K said:
I note that textus receptus can translate as "received wisdom"; you believe that this collection of material is a genuine record, some of which has been kept intact for more than two millenia? Despite having been found at different times in different countries, some unspecified agency has managed to reconstruct the Bible from it? Do you mean the Bible as it was first put together, or (one of) today's editions
Don't think so. The power of the papacy was waning at the end of the Renaissance, when many of the beliefs based on "Bible science" had long been overturned. Not to mention various world events such as the discovery of the Americas, wars here and there in Europe etc Luther introduced an alternative to the strictly Catholic dogma at a time Europe definitely needed it, since the influence of Christianity if not the Pope was still very strong. Europe needed a "new" dogma which could be adapted to the new scientific findings, one of which was that the earth orbits around the sun, not the converse.
The new Christianity--Lutheranism--also permitted science to flourish and scientific enquiry to at last throw off the influence of Catholic dogma.
It allowed Henry VIII of England to establish centres of such scientific enquiry, universities which were not tied to Rome, but to the Anglican Church, unlike most universities on the mainland.
Let's not forget, Bruno who agreed with Galileo, was burned at the stake for heresy
Nonsense. The Catholics produced the Bible. The only significant alterations were made by Protestants, who discarded all the OT writings after the Age of Alexander.
Perhaps you have heard of the Apocrypha.
You obviously have no clue about the history of the book you hold sacred.
For over a thousand years (c. AD 400–1530), the Vulgate was the definitive edition of the most influential text in Western European society. Indeed, for most Western Christians, it was the only version of the Bible ever encountered. The Vulgate's influence throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance into the Early Modern Period is even greater than that of the King James Version in English; for Christians during these times the phraseology and wording of the Vulgate permeated all areas of the culture. Aside from its use in prayer, liturgy and private study, the Vulgate served as inspiration for ecclesiastical art and architecture, hymns, countless paintings, and popular mystery plays.
In one sentence you have rewritten 2000 years of history. Explain then how J.S. Bach, who wrote many Catholic Masses (for the common people) also wrote his famous St Matthew Passion, rendering the New Testament narrative for the common people to celebrate?
[video=youtube;M_LLFfFXaUA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_LLFfFXaUA[/video]
You've never been in a medieval church? They're scattered across Europe. You will find the Bible stories illustrated in stained glass, statuary, in plaster, wood, oils, embroidery, weaving, and gilt, in other words, in just about every medium available. Your ideas about the past are just pure inventions. You need only read about Catholic sacred music and liturgy, and learn about the nature of their services, which include readings from the Bible, to see how ridiculous it is to claim that the Church outlawed the Bible or persecuted Bible readers.
The fact is, until the advent of the printing press the Bible was hand copied. Very few copies existed and very few people could read. Somehow this fact has been run through the distortion generator at the Creationist sources you read. If you would only read instead the actual history and investigate the art, literature, music, and architecture of the pre-Reformation period, you would see how ludicrous your source material is.
Which pope is the Evil One, or are they all? Note, your belief in a book created by an Evil One would amount to Satanism. You have a paradox to resolve. And if you tug just a little at the thread that holds your zany ideas together, you'll discover they all fall apart. They're mere inventions unsupported by fact. Just a little history, and just a little science, and you'll discover how absurd your nutty ideas are.