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And you can claim that you have the power to shoot lightning bolts from your fingertips. That doesn't make it so. Zero credibility without evidence for such claims. So no, he doesn't get to claim that and except anyone to accept the rhetoric as anything more than biased baseless toxic fumes.
Like the hand of God in the fire, from that documentary you use to go on about?
And you can claim that you have the power to shoot lightning bolts from your fingertips. That doesn't make it so. Zero credibility without evidence for such claims. So no, he doesn't get to claim that and except anyone to accept the rhetoric as anything more than biased baseless toxic fumes.
All people have the right to make all sorts of claims...as you have proven. It's called freedom of speech.
Whether others accept those claims is the question. As we have proven.
I don't believe in forced Christianity. Technically, you can claim anything you want. Just don't expect to have any level of credibility if you demonstrate an extreme bias with zero supporting evidence.
You mean like Christianity does...and especially you?
Quote:
Originally Posted by jeffbase40
The fact that atheists are just so completely sold on evolution and won't even entertain a completely different possibility in regards to the origin of life just shows me that they are close minded.
Says he that consistently tells us that nothing, NOTHING we can ever say or do will make him think differently about his god belief.
You mean like Christianity does...and especially you?
Says he that consistently tells us that nothing, NOTHING we can ever say or do will make him think differently about his god belief.
Jeff like a number of Christians never seem to have a problem with germ theory, gravitational theory, electromagnetic theory, atomic theory, the theory of general relativity or any other theories. Quite telling. It's also quite telling how Jeff doesn't seem to be able to deconstruct the main problems he has with evolutionary theory on a scientific level. Personally I want Jeff to explain all his problems with evolutionary theory from a science viewpoint so we can address those one by one. Should be interesting. Let's face it, these Christians like Jeff always reject science when it collides with their faith. Wow, sounds like the time of Galileo.
The apologists, Jeff, refute you and your claim of meticulous transcription of documents by appealing to bits of scripture getting lost to try to excuse Matthe's blunder. And the NT is even worse. Amongst the various excuses as to why Mark doesn't have a resurrection appearance to Mary, never mind Simon, or Cleophas for that matter, not a hint at a 40 day slide -lecture to the apostles as per Luke, is because "It got lost' (1).
Meticulous transmission of script, my foot Jeff.
I snipped a lot of your commentary, Transponder, to save room for a little response.
The Dead Sea Scrolls sometimes are very good at showing little to no change in what was written hundreds of years before our Masoretic texts that form the various English Bibles. Isaiah is the example fundamentalists use to point that out.
Yet the ignore the fact that the Qumran Scroll of Jeremiah is 1/7 shorter than what is in our Bibles and has a completely different order on what remains. Not a few discrepancies, but multiple. And what it proves is that there was a great deal of Palestinian redaction of Jeremiah to include additional material.
Quote:
Karel Van Der Toorn, in his book Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, writes:
Biblical scholars have long been aware of the fact that the Greek translation of Jeremiah as extant in the Septuagint is shorter by one-seventh than the text in the Hebrew Bible. Its arrangement of the material, moreover, differs at some points from that in the Hebrew text. The most striking instance is the position of the Oracles against the Nations. Whereas the Septuagint places them right after 25:13 (“ And I will bring upon that land all that I have decreed against it, all that is recorded in this book — that which Jeremiah prophesied against all the nations”), the Hebrew Bible has them at the end of the book (Chapters 46-51). The discoveries in the Judean Desert have yielded a fragment of a Hebrew version of Jeremiah (4QJerb) that agrees with the Septuagint (henceforth JerLXX) against the Hebrew text known from the Masoretic tradition (Henceforth JerMT). Based on this fragment, scholars have concluded that the Greek translation goes back to a Hebrew text of Jeremiah that differs in important respects from the Hebrew Bible. The differences between JerMT and JerLXX are such that they cannot be attributed to scribal errors in the process of transmission. Nor can the Hebrew vorlage[4] of the Septuagint be interpreted as an abbreviated version of the book. In view of their different placement of the Oracles against the Nations, JerMT and JerLXX represent two different editions of the same book. Chronologically, the edition reflected in JerLXX precedes the one extant in JerMT -------------------------------------------------- So what does this all mean? Well for one thing, the Dead Sea Scrolls have exposed the fact that the Hebrew Scriptures changed over time, thus calling into question the 20th century theological innovation known as inerrancy. Moreover, the Dead Sea Scrolls have called into question the validity and veracity of the Masoretic text, being examples of the Septuagint textual tradition. This, the Dead Sea Scrolls call into question all translations based upon the Masoretic text.[12] Perhaps this is why conservative evangelical scholars will still tell you that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not needed; to admit otherwise would call into question their entire theological paradigm.
Some decades ago fundamentalists began to claim that only in the ORIGINAL documents was there inerrancy. Problem is we are now finding texts that do not reflect our tradition, but fundamentalists do not wish to revise their views toward the "older" documents.
What that PROVES, is that fundamentalists have no critical learning skills when it comes to what they have chosen to be "holy" texts. No amount of proof is adequate. Jesus Himself couldn't persuade them to think differently.
And that is a significant reflection of the lack of both morality and intelligence in their biblical views.
Now with regard to NT inconsistencies, if they were all the exact same thing with nary a mistake except in order of remission, believers would be criticized for "collusion" regarding Jesus. But the inconsistencies really reveal a germ of truth in the stories, because most resemble one another without having the exactness the 21st century mind calls for. Thus there are three accounts about the number of women on the morning of the Resurrection. In addition, none of those writings were intended to be historical documents. They were intended as faith documents. The error of fundamentalists is they haven't any faith apart from a "perfect" Bible. That insistence has cost them credibility and rendered whatever "witness" they may have had regarding a "life-changing" experience with God to no effect---because non-believers aren't stupid---they SEE and READ the discrepancies and are so irritated by the insistence that there are none they just want to vomit it all out. Fundamentalism works against both equality among people regardless of faith, but against the very thing they claim is "true."
If our biblical writers were called in to give accounts of what they saw (or more likely heard, wouldn't those accounts be as different as listening to what people report as seeing in a capital murder trial? What fundamentalists do is follow their grand marshal of the nation who somehow was able to conjure up "thousands" of people cheering when the Twin Towers came down! Go figure.
Last edited by Wardendresden; 01-03-2018 at 01:05 AM..
Originally Posted by jeffbase40 The fact that atheists are just so completely sold on evolution and won't even entertain a completely different possibility in regards to the origin of life just shows me that they are close minded.
Jeff, the science behind evolutionary theory addresses how life evolved and changed over time and the processes and factors behind this. The fields of biology, paleontology, molecular biology, genetics, anthropology, and others strongly support evolutionary theory. The theory has one of it's many strengths also in it's predictive value. The origins of life are more oriented towards discussion of abiogenesis. Now Jeff, your assignment should you choose to accept it, is to explain all the ways those fields don't support evolution. To be fair, this might require you to write a comprehensive research paper that should be able to pass the peer review process in science with those who work in those fields.
Jeff like a number of Christians never seem to have a problem with germ theory, gravitational theory, electromagnetic theory, atomic theory, the theory of general relativity or any other theories. Quite telling. It's also quite telling how Jeff doesn't seem to be able to deconstruct the main problems he has with evolutionary theory on a scientific level. Personally I want Jeff to explain all his problems with evolutionary theory from a science viewpoint so we can address those one by one. Should be interesting. Let's face it, these Christians like Jeff always reject science when it collides with their faith. Wow, sounds like the time of Galileo.
Like any intelligent, thinking person, some of us adjust our biblical views to fit the latest science finds--and science itself changes as well so we are all constantly making adjustments.
It's always interesting to me that the idea of "original sin" that originated with Augustine of Hippo is totally acceptable to fundamentalists, but his warning about why Christians shouldn't make stupid statements about nature is completely ignored:
Quote:
Saint Augustine (A.D. 354-430) in his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim) provided excellent advice for all Christians who are faced with the task of interpreting Scripture in the light of scientific knowledge. This translation is by J. H. Taylor in Ancient Christian Writers, Newman Press, 1982, volume 41.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]
I snipped a lot of your commentary, Transponder, to save room for a little response.
The Dead Sea Scrolls sometimes are very good at showing little to no change in what was written hundreds of years before our Masoretic texts that form the various English Bibles. Isaiah is the example fundamentalists use to point that out.
Yet the ignore the fact that the Qumran Scroll of Jeremiah is 1/7 shorter than what is in our Bibles and has a completely different order on what remains. Not a few discrepancies, but multiple. And what it proves is that there was a great deal of Palestinian redaction of Jeremiah to include additional material.
Some decades ago fundamentalists began to claim that only in the ORIGINAL documents was there inerrancy. Problem is we are now finding texts that do not reflect our tradition, but fundamentalists do not wish to revise their views toward the "older" documents.
What that PROVES, is that fundamentalists have no critical learning skills when it comes to what they have chosen to be "holy" texts. No amount of proof is adequate. Jesus Himself couldn't persuade them to think differently.
And that is a significant reflection of the lack of both morality and intelligence in their biblical views.
Now with regard to NT inconsistencies, if they were all the exact same thing with nary a mistake except in order of remission, believers would be criticized for "collusion" regarding Jesus. But the inconsistencies really reveal a germ of truth in the stories, because most resemble one another without having the exactness the 21st century mind calls for. Thus there are three accounts about the number of women on the morning of the Resurrection. In addition, none of those writings were intended to be historical documents. They were intended as faith documents. The error of fundamentalists is they haven't any faith apart from a "perfect" Bible. That insistence has cost them credibility and rendered whatever "witness" they may have had regarding a "life-changing" experience with God to no effect---because non-believers aren't stupid---they SEE and READ the discrepancies and are so irritated by the insistence that there are none they just want to vomit it all out. Fundamentalism works against both equality among people regardless of faith, but against the very thing they claim is "true."
If our biblical writers were called in to give accounts of what they saw (or more likely heard, wouldn't those accounts be as different as listening to what people report as seeing in a capital murder trial? What fundamentalists do is follow their grand marshal of the nation who somehow was able to conjure up "thousands" of people cheering when the Twin Towers came down! Go figure.
Thank you. I'd heard there were differences between the Qumran documents and the Torah tets used today, but I hadn't looked up the details.
But your point about the NT is one that is often used to try to validate them as reliable eyewitness accounts - that they do differ, as one might expect from people with imperfect memories of the events. And indeed, if they were all exactly written alike, even in talking about what happened as well as what was was said, we would suspect collusion or rather, that the accounts were all the same, copied four times. And that is in fact what we often find. The wording which was supposedly written from the descriptive imagination of the writer often follows the same wording, notably in the synoptic gospels where two or the three say the same thing. That is evidence that there was an original text that the three used; but also, there was additional text that two of them used but the third didn't. The one common to Matthew and Luke is called "Q" and there is one that Matthew and Mark used, but Luke didn't (I call that "M') and of course where one goes off on their own, they are adding stuff of their own invention. You can tell that because that is where they contradict so seriously that their testimony must be considered unreliable.
Your point about the Grand marshal reporting that thousands cheered when the towers fell makes the point. I never heard anything of the kind. If this Grand marshal (whoever that is) really said such a thing, it has to be wrong, even if he was contemporary with the events and was even there at the time. Why would he say such a thing? Is he deluded? Does he have some kind of agenda that would be helped by saying such a thing? Perhaps you can clarify that.
But there is another thing: I have never heard what you suggest before, so I am in the position of a reader today reading the gospel report. Are you relating some rumour going around at the time? Or just making up an Analogy to make a case? I don't know. But whichever it is, I am sure from the history of that time, that thousands (in the USA, at least) did not cheer when the towers fell. So, no matter whether the Grand master said the thing or (like Luke in Acts reporting what Gamaliel is supposed to have said) you made it up, it is not to be credited, on my present knowledge, anyway.
But in addition to this, there is evidence that the gospel -writers cannot be eyewitnesses. Quite apart from the discrepancies with what others report (as the Grand marshal's report contradicts what is known to history), Luke's nativity contradicts, not only Matthew's account, fatally, but makes no sense historically. And Matthew cannot possibly have seen two donkeys. He cannot have been there at the time or he would have known better. And there is an OT quote from Jesus in the temple which a Jew, knowing his own scripture could not have said, as it follows the Septuagint mistranslation. The evidence is unassailable: Matthew could not read Hebrew and he worked from the Greek translation of the Torah. And of course, he cannot be an eyewitness.
Mark also is not an eyewitness and he puts things in that the others overlook, for example Pilate's surprise at Jesus dying so quickly (which when you think of it, contradicts John's leg -breaking). But mostly because Mark get his geography confused. In the course of inserting the 'M' document material about the Syrio -Phoenecian woman and the feeding of the 4,000 (before the canonical feeding of five thousand) he mixes up the trip to the lonely place (Bethsaida) and has him travelling from that place to the same place, and in the wrong direction. This shows that his is not the original Synoptic text (or Luke at least would have written the same - Matthew at least seems to have known where the places were) and in a lesser way, he adapted the common text, just as Matthew and Luke did.
This is just a brief refutation of the claim that the contradictions validate the Gospels. That is a handy claim to make for the apologists, but it does not stand up under scrutiny.
And I end up by wondering as I did when I came to these conclusions: Why had nobody else done this? It is not hard, it only requires someone to do it. I can understand it from the Bible scholars with a vested interest in not undermining the scriptures (Indeed, I read a very scholarly book on Matthew that only even noted ONE problem, with the two donkeys, and he brushed that aside with the flimsiest excuse - not even an 'excuse' - imaginable; the Believing scholars will lie for their faith. But why, I wonder, have none of the skeptical scholars done this? They have picked up a lot of fatal contradictions, true, but don't seem to put it all together. I suspect they look at Mark's confusion (if they noticed it) and just said 'contradiction!' and didn't consider how and why he made it . It was just a 'Mistake' and that was good enough.
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 01-03-2018 at 02:22 AM..
Like any intelligent, thinking person, some of us adjust our biblical views to fit the latest science finds--and science itself changes as well so we are all constantly making adjustments.
...
Yes, this should be true of people. Unfortunately, some people cannot adjust their views in such circumstances because their beliefs are so fragile that they feel their only course of action is to fight truth so as to prevent change. It's really quite pathetic.
I snipped a lot of your commentary, Transponder, to save room for a little response.
The Dead Sea Scrolls sometimes are very good at showing little to no change in what was written hundreds of years before our Masoretic texts that form the various English Bibles. Isaiah is the example fundamentalists use to point that out.
Yet the ignore the fact that the Qumran Scroll of Jeremiah is 1/7 shorter than what is in our Bibles and has a completely different order on what remains. Not a few discrepancies, but multiple. And what it proves is that there was a great deal of Palestinian redaction of Jeremiah to include additional material.
Some decades ago fundamentalists began to claim that only in the ORIGINAL documents was there inerrancy. Problem is we are now finding texts that do not reflect our tradition, but fundamentalists do not wish to revise their views toward the "older" documents.
What that PROVES, is that fundamentalists have no critical learning skills when it comes to what they have chosen to be "holy" texts. No amount of proof is adequate. Jesus Himself couldn't persuade them to think differently.
And that is a significant reflection of the lack of both morality and intelligence in their biblical views.
Now with regard to NT inconsistencies, if they were all the exact same thing with nary a mistake except in order of remission, believers would be criticized for "collusion" regarding Jesus. But the inconsistencies really reveal a germ of truth in the stories, because most resemble one another without having the exactness the 21st century mind calls for. Thus there are three accounts about the number of women on the morning of the Resurrection. In addition, none of those writings were intended to be historical documents. They were intended as faith documents. The error of fundamentalists is they haven't any faith apart from a "perfect" Bible. That insistence has cost them credibility and rendered whatever "witness" they may have had regarding a "life-changing" experience with God to no effect---because non-believers aren't stupid---they SEE and READ the discrepancies and are so irritated by the insistence that there are none they just want to vomit it all out. Fundamentalism works against both equality among people regardless of faith, but against the very thing they claim is "true."
If our biblical writers were called in to give accounts of what they saw (or more likely heard, wouldn't those accounts be as different as listening to what people report as seeing in a capital murder trial? What fundamentalists do is follow their grand marshal of the nation who somehow was able to conjure up "thousands" of people cheering when the Twin Towers came down! Go figure.
This was fascinating, and enlightening. Thank you, Warden!
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