Who come first the theist or the atheist

[spidergoat]

Theism is faith in a single Creator. Atheism is FAITH in NO God. If faith is Michael, is there atheist Michael, or is there only one archangel for all faith?

No, it's not a faith, because it's based on evidence and could be theoretically contradicted by emerging evidence.

 

[Aqueous Id]

No, it's not a faith, because it's based on evidence and could be theoretically contradicted by emerging evidence.

Precisely.

An alien perusing this thread might conclude that theism is the inability to comprehend this.

 

[Emil]

Who come first the theist or the atheist

Good question!

In the beginning was the God.
How is God, atheist or theist?

 

[kx000]

I do comprehend this, but they need to sit down and discover faith. Who are these aliens?

 

[kx000]

Good question!

In the beginning was the God.
How is God, atheist or theist?

He is unbelieving of a God above his existence, but can not say for certain.

 

[kx000]

No, it's not a faith, because it's based on evidence and could be theoretically contradicted by emerging evidence.

Religion is based on stories, stories gone misunderstood.

 

[lightgigantic]

No, it's not a faith, because it's based on evidence and could be theoretically contradicted by emerging evidence.

lol
and what form would that theoretical evidence take?

 

[lightgigantic]

No, he’s talking about before ignorance. Primitive people did not ignore thunderclaps, they took cover.

Ignorance begins later, by deliberately ignoring the best evidence available, such as insisting that the world is flat and at the center of the universe. At some point that belief became grounded in ignorance, because it persisted despite best evidence to the contrary.

actually he is talking of the knowledge base of a new born child being maintained through to adulthood - doesn't matter whether the subject is physics, religion or modern history - the result is the same : ignorance

Modern atheism is the opposition to ignorance, particularly as it is manifested in various forms of superstition. If anything, religion would tend to rely on ignorance, to the extent that it is founded on superstition.

Then you are talking about explicit atheism ... which clearly comes after theism

It’s hard to imagine a religion devoid of superstition. Do you know of any?

It's hard to imagine any high end knowledge base that is devoid of elements of superstition - eg. marrying reductionist views of consciousness with physics etc etc
:shrug:

 

[ZAV]

AID-

@ZAV

I said nothing for or against any school of thought, preferring the artifacts themselves over most analysis, contrary to your claim.

You did no analysis of the artefacts, nor have you read any actual studies on them. I doubt you even read the books you quote from. Instead, you take an idea of how Religion evolved gleaned from reading the propaganda in the Modern Atheist community online and then find the authority quotes from websites and suchlike to post as if that’s convincing. I on the other hand spend 9 years and a boatload of money to learn from various professors who would laugh in your face if you tried to present this, and not all of them were Theists.

You aren’t letting the artefacts speak. This is like when a goofy Evangelical decides that Allah was a moon god and post pictures of an Idol from Mecca with a crescent on his chest, or like the statues of the Goddess found in Europe used by Neo-Pagans, especially Wiccans, to prove how their beliefs are 10’000 years old. I’ve seen this bunk before, and it always falls apart if you look into it.

I have said nothing for or against linear historical development, and in fact the first modern authority I cited – after your camp introduced him –

What camp do I represent in your Mind, exactly? Because I do hate being called an apologist for telling people what actual Scholarship says.

was Boas, who already recognizes that development is not linear. Boas’ place on the timeline is irrelevant to modern scholarship, because he brings one of the last eyewitness accounts of primitive people before they disappeared. The particular observation that he made, regarding their fear of nature as the underlying cause for superstition and myth, is not impugned by your remarks. Nor is he to be dismissed for giving us this insight merely because new schools of thought, in other areas, have emerged.

Boas was not discussed at length because gosh shucks, I wanted to discuss the specific linguistical argument you made. You completely evaded it. Now I’m just telling you, Boas was not a Hebrew Scholar and had no relevance in the study of the Hebrew Language, and your argument that Elohim was Polytheistic is an absurdity.


However, I will say this, if you rest too heavily on one man you are a fool. Boas’s observations will be filtered through his own understanding of the world, and be influenced by his own Biases and presuppositions. That is not an insult, that’s True of literally everyone. While you may say that you did use other sources, your defence of Boas here is weak because it doesn’t matter what he saw, his observations, while valuable, cannot be the final absolute Authority.

I never said anything for or against the presaging of Hebrew monotheism by prior cults, since I am not trying to prove their monotheism was unique. It’s an interesting subject. I have no doubt that the people of Canaan spread religious ideas from abroad and insinuated them into their own myths.

That’s nice but, you still have no actual evidence linking Elohim with “the gods” like you previously stated. I also see goal post moving in the distance…

I did not change my position as you claim, I merely paid lip service to your paroxysm over grammar, without changing the point I originally directed towards the fundamentalists.

Then you confirm that you are a fool because you refuse to even reconsider something that you decided was True and facts are immaterial to you. How, exactly, do you differ from the Fundamentalists you oppose?

You were the one spouting semantics.

It is not a semantic. Your argument that Elohim really means the gods and that Bible Translators deceive people by translating it as God rests entirely on Elohim being a Literal Plural and the original Readers understanding it as “the gods”. This can’t be True die to the Verb tense. Your claim that we don’t know for sure how the Ancient Hebrew language worked and at best I know a reconstruction works against you as well, because you don’t even know the modern reconstruction, much less what the Ancients knew, so don’t bring that back up.

The only material facts we have show us a singular entity being addressed in Genesis 1. We have no evidence that the word Elohim was meant as a plural and ample evidnce it was meant as a Singular.

As I explained, I was addressing extremists. These folks adhere to the ultra-literal interpretation of their English translation with a worldview that denies history, among other things. I notice you do not rally your troops to marshal that unruly mob, with your Supreme Court of scholarship in tow.

I don’t want to marshal troops, I want to make a point of valid scholarship. Simply out, you can’t claim Elohim is plural as the Grammar won’t allow for it.

By the way, your worldview also denies History, and I highly doubt you can read the Hebrew and you also rely on English Translations. Don’t you think it hypocritical, and in fact silly, for you to castigate others?

OR should I post my next post in Hebrew?

If the text had only borrowed El from the earlier society my point would still stand, in arguing against fundamentalism. From the beginning I have been demonstrating an often heard fallacy among common fundamentalists who deny not only all criticism of the text, but history itself. Yet the El of their religious devotion is a borrowed term from an earlier cult. That earlier cult was polytheistic, the reference is to a polytheistic creation myth that predates the Hebrew tradition, and which has left traces of its DNA at the crime scene. You will not find these kinds of morsels from among the chaff in their Bible annotations because it would invariably lead the editors’ sheep into apostasy. All I did was separate the wheat from the chaff. Come down off your high horse and have a bite. Down here we have no dietary restrictions against best evidence, and though we eat with our hands, we try to keep them clean.

Are you a complete idiot? I am sorry but, your argument is untenable. I mean, I have Bibles, in English, which discuss the linguistical origins of the words at length, and many of them are used by Fundamentalists. I own a Holeman Christian Standard that discuses El, for instance. All you need to do is walk into a Christian bookstore and find he Right study Bible and you get this.

However, all Languages gain words from earlier Languages. The modern English word “God” was originally from “Goden” which was derivative of “Odin”. That doesn’t, however, prove that modern Christians are Polytheistic.


Even if El was a term borrowed from a Polytheistic culture, it doesn’t prove that the Hebrew writers of Gen 1 were.

It becomes even worse for your argument when you look into the word El, because like most Ancient words its actual origins are obscure. We don’t know exactly where it came from or what it originally meant and have no direct evidenced that the Ancient Hebrews borrowed it, or if it was the other way round.

Still, even if El was the name of a pagan god, that doesn’t mean anything. You’d have to prove that the Hebrews used El as the same god, and also believed in other gods. You can’t show that by merely showing the borrowed the word itself.

At some early point polytheism impinges upon Hebrew tradition. Much later we find the earliest codices. By that era monotheism was taking root. That’s the inescapable history in a nutshell.

But its not inescapable, it’s speculative and based on unjustified free association.

Now: are you going to argue that monotheism comes first? Don’t tell me, after all that bluster, that you’re a fundamentalist!

I will argue that it may have come First, and I read articles even by Atheists who said this. The argument goes that originally the Ancients believed in an overarching spirit, and later on applied spirits to rivers, trees, and other objects, so that gods began to multiply. If this Theory is True, then Monotheism would have had to come First.

But would saying that really make me a Fundamentalist to you?

 

[ZAV]

AID, do you even know what Faith is?

 

[Aqueous Id]

Good question!

In the beginning was the God.
How is God, atheist or theist?

How about the beginning of human awareness? That would seem to lead to the question of whether theism came first.

Who were these early people and what did they think about the world, and why?

Imagine the time that passed from the dawn of human intelligence until the first day someone said "God" (in some language we may never know).

That time span could have been 100,000 years... maybe more.

What were they thinking during all of that history, if they didn't even have a concept of God?

 

[Aqueous Id]

I do comprehend this, but they need to sit down and discover faith. Who are these aliens?

Any person who would come upon this thread with no prior information to guide them.

Good question!
In the beginning was the God.
How is God, atheist or theist?

He is unbelieving of a God above his existence, but can not say for certain.

God is not certain if there is a greater God? Why?

 

[Aqueous Id]

ZAV,

Flame on, bro.

Here is Asherah, the putative consort to El and Queen of Heaven (Jer 7:18 and Jer 44:17–19, 25), and by Ugarit tradition the mother of 6 dozen Elohim, also associated with Ba'al:

Biblical scholars now recognize that in the pre-exilic era Asherah worship, infant sacrifice, solar veneration, and other religious practices attacked by biblical authors represented normal Israelite worship, while monotheism was a late development in the Babylonian Exile and subsequent years.

citing Robert Gnuse, PhD

I tend to agree that Asherah was probably consort of the Israelite god. It seems likely that, in Canaan, the early Israelites, originally pastoral semi-nomads, were slowly becoming settled agrarians. As such they would have needed to worship deities who promoted their farming activities: a heterosexual couple one of whose concerns was the land's fertility. In that worship they would be like the cultures surrounding them. What would be more natural, then, than their adopting and adapting deities from the agrarian peoples among whom they were settling? So they identified their main god with Canaanite El(5) and, as consort for their own god, took over El's female counterpart Asherah.

citing Johanna Stuckey, PhD, Asherah and the God of the Early Israelite

and

citing Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, Oxford University Press (2001)

One scholarly position is that the identification of Yahweh with Ēl is late, that Yahweh was earlier thought of as only one of many gods, and not normally identified with Ēl. In some places, especially in Psalm 29, Yahweh is clearly envisioned as a storm god, something not true of Ēl so far as we know (though true of his son, Ba'al/Hadad). (Noted Parallel: El is derived from Sumerian Enlil, God of Wind.[13]) It is Yahweh who fights Leviathan in Isaiah 27.1; Psalm 74.14; Job 3.8 & 40.25/41.1, a deed attributed both to Ba’al/Hadad and ‘Anat in the Ugaritic texts, but not to Ēl.

citing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(god)#Hebrew_Bible

finally:

Asked in the same documentary if the Jews were monotheistic with a religion distinct from the Canaanite religion, Herbert Niehr from the University of Tübingen answered: "Between the 10th century and the beginning of their exile in 586 there was polytheism as normal religion all throughout Israel; only afterwards things begin to change and very slowly they begin to change. I would say it is only correct for the last centuries, maybe only from the period of the Maccabees, that means the second century BC, so in the time of Jesus of Nazareth it is true, but for the time before it, it is not true

citing Bible's Buried Secrets, Did God have A Wife, BBC, 2011

Here is a NOVA trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sw-NFvueK8

Here is the full length program: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/bibles-buried-secrets.html

 

[ZAV]

Saying I am flaming you really doesn’t advance your argument. Look mate, you still haven’t provided any evidence in regards to my specific statements. UI myself, several posts back, said the Bible recorded Israelites practicing Polytheistic worship. It doesn’t really prove anything, well, other than the Bible was correct. That’s one reason I find people like you rather dull witted, as you think these things somehow invalidate the Bible when instead its exactly what it described.

However, what you just posted doesn’t prove that the specific Author of the First Chapter of Genesis was a Polytheist, as you initially claimed. It doesn‘t prove that Polytheism came before Monotheism. All you have done is to once again post irrelevant portions of books you haven’t Actually read and projected onto them a meaning they don’t have to win an argument no one else is engaged in.

 

[ZAV]

Now, I will ask you again, please focus, don’t call it a semantic, And address the specific point I made.


You specifically said that Genesis One was written by the Elohimits, following a crude understanding of the Documentary Hypothesis. You then said that Bible Translators obscured the Truth by calling Elohim God, when it should be the gods, and that the text was written by Polytheists. I quoted you saying specifically this. You did not say initially that Elohim was left over from earlier languages that came from Polytheistic Cultures, but that the text of Gen 1 was itself a Polytheistic text.

It can’t be, because the verb tense is singular.

Now, either explains why the verb tense is singular for a plural subject, or else admit you were mistaken. Don’t tell me this is my problem, and don’t redirect to some unrelated culture or presumed past linguistical association.


Just admit that Gen 1 was itself written by Monotheists.

 

[spidergoat]

lol
and what form would that theoretical evidence take?

God knows.

 

[lightgigantic]

God knows.

hence the notion that the type of atheism you represent being open to evidence of god is certainly very theoretical .....

 

[spidergoat]

Yes. But consider this;

http://zarbi.posterous.com/god-and-evidence-a-strident-proposal




And this by PZ Myers:

The nature of this god is always vague and undefined and most annoyingly, plastic — suggest a test and it is always redefined safely away from the risk. Furthermore, any evidence of a deity will be natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties which god is exempted from by the believers' own definitions, so there can be no evidence for it. And any being who did suddenly manifest in some way — a 900 foot tall Jesus, for instance — would not fit any existing theology, so such a creature would not fit the claims of any religion, but the existence of any phenomenon that science cannot explain would not discomfit science at all, since we know there is much we don't understand already, and adding one more mystery to the multitude will not faze us in the slightest.

So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let's stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.​

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/10/its_like_he_was_reading_my_min.php

 

[universaldistress]

@ZAV and Aqueous ID

Lets take a look at an excerpt of the text:

"26, And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/1poly94.html

If you follow the link you will find:

Genesis 1:26-27 says, "And God said, `Let us make man in our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea....' And God created man in his own image in the image of God created he him, male and female he created them."

The word man in this text includes male and female . This is confirmed by the word them whose antecedent is man. So he and his in this sense are both male and female. In fact, the word him is superfluous, and we could omit the superfluity by stating the passage like this: "In the image of God, he created them male and female." This means that male and female were created in the image of God. In other words, man [male and female or mankind] was created in the image of God.

Since man [male and female] was created in the image of God, it logically follows that this god was both male and female. The word our implies more than one, so, in effect, what we have is a god-pair consisting of a male god and a female god.

Chapter one of Genesis is from the Elohist source that used Elohim [gods plural] in referring to "God." Originally, the male god was Baal, and the female god was his consort Ashtoreth. Orthodox clergymen will argue that the us and our in the creation passage are simply examples of the "royal we" used by emperors, but this rationalization is false. The book of Genesis was written before the "royal we" originated. It began with the first Roman emperor, Augustus, and included the emperor and his loyal civil administrators. Afterwards, it was sometimes used in pagan religious ceremonies in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, which at that time was polytheistic.

In Genesis 3:22 , there is further evidence of polytheism as the Hebrew gods are depicted as saying, "Behold the man has become as one of us to know good and evil, and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever...." Here again the orthodox clergy will claim that the us is really the LORD God and the angels that were with him, but this cannot be for a number of reasons. First, there is no mention of angels in Genesis until Chapter 19 , but even if these angels did exist, they would have been acting upon orders of the god-pair of 1:26-27 . So the us here was again referring to that god-pair. To further show that the our and us in these Genesis passages referred to the god-pair of early Hebrew polytheism, we have only to review the history of the ideological clashes between the proponents of Baal and those of Yahweh that went on in the Caananite-Israelite lands from the time of the judges until the fall of Judah and the Babylonian captivity.

During these times, Baal and his consort Ashtoreth were worshiped by many Israelites both in Samaria (Israel) and Judah even after the captivity, mainly by those who remained in the conquered lands. Yahwists like Ezra finally purged the Israelites (by then known as Jews) of all Baal residuals and even forced them to give up their Baalish wives and families (see Ezra 9-10 ). Ezra's purging of Baal appeared to be complete. It was his wish to erase Baal completely from the Israelite past; however, the residuals in Genesis 1 and 3 continue to remind us not only of Israel's polytheistic past but of the Canaanite origins of Judaism.

Using archaeological evidence on one hand and biblical between-the-line implications on the other, the following conclusions support the premises stated above:

(1) Most of the Israelites at the time of the exodus (about 1250 B.C.) were already located in the Canaanite area, which, incidentally, was at that time a part of Greater Egypt. A relatively small number, probably only one tribe (Levi), were in Egypt. Exodus 1:15 , for example, says that only two midwives were needed to attend the births of Hebrew children. Furthermore, the Israelites needed divine help to defeat a small seminomadic tribe (Ex. 17:8-13 ) in contradiction to the later editor's estimate of an army of 600,000 men (12:37 ) besides children (and women?).

(2) This relatively small group of Israelites from the outside (Egypt proper) formed some type of symbiotic relationship with the much larger inside group (which consisted of Israelites and Canaanites, the so-called mixed multitude) to form the "12 tribes" (when they were not fighting each other).

(3) The outside group was the Yahwist cult, the inside group the Baal cult. The struggle between the two groups went on for well over 500 years.

(4) Apparently it was not until the reign of Josiah that the Yahwist group was able to achieve dominance. The "lost book" of Deuteronomy was discovered in the house of the LORD (2 Kings 22:8 ), and the Passover was reinstituted after a lapse of 500 years (if indeed it even existed before then). The golden calf (symbol of the Kings of Israel) from the reign of Jeroboam was suppressed (2 Kings 23:15 ).

(5) Biblical scholars agree on how the Pentateuch was put together. The sources were (E) Elohist, (J) Yahwist, (P) Priestly, (D) Deuteronomist, and (R) Redactor. The last two were written to dovetail with the first two, and the writers tried to do two things: (1) eliminate all contradictions, and (2) eliminate all vestiges of the Israelite primitive past of pagan polytheisism.

Richard Elliott Friedman noted in Who Wrote the Bible? that after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B. C., some Jews fled to Egypt and formed a colony at Elephantine at the first cataract of the Nile (p. 153). They built a temple there, which was clearly against the law of centralization in Deuteronomy. The extraordinary thing about the Elephantine temple, however, was that this group of expatriated Jews worshiped Yahweh and two other gods, one male and one female. This god-pair apparently was Baal and Ashtoreth. The Yahwist Jews living elsewhere were not happy with this development, for when the Elephantine temple was destroyed in the 5th century, B.C.E., they would not help to rebuild it (p. 154).

The scholarly piecing together of information from archaeological discoveries and overlooked textual implications of a polytheistic past indicate that the editors failed in both endeavors listed above. As a result, we know today that monotheism came to Judaism not by divine revelation but by a process of theistic evolution.

Source: Polytheism in Genesis:
Baal and Ashtoreth vs. Yahweh
by Sol Abrams

1994 / January-February


Incidentally, if you Google "genesis was written by polytheists" Abrams is first in the list, followed in second by this thread:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ge...s=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a


Additionally:

Elohim (אֱלהִים) is a grammatically singular or plural noun for "god" or "gods" in both modern and ancient Hebrew language. When used with singular verbs and adjectives elohim is usually singular, "god" or especially, the God. When used with plural verbs and adjectives elohim is usually plural, "gods" or "powers".

Source wiki

I am not sure if you have covered this ground already, as I haven't read the whole thread.

 

[universaldistress]

We could also say that as Jesus is a separate entity to god, yet with godlike powers, the New Testament at least was written by polytheists? I would interpret it that way anyway.

We could also say that the man who reads anything in the bible, and takes it literally, is a fool.