This is NOT how I think or anybody I know.
Of course it isn’t how YOU think you think, that is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. The thing is, everything I said in the post is completely accurate.
I you knew this is how you are living your life then it wouldn’t be cognitive dissonance, and if it wasn’t for cognitive dissonance you would not be a literalist, pure and simple fact.
We KNOW the scripture is true and EVERYTHING proceeds from that absolute knowledge.
But you don’t KNOW this, you THINK it is, you BELIEVE it is, and the reasons why you think it is because you have absorbed so much pro materials that you are unable to open your mind up to the possibility of accepting anything that contradicts your view of the Bible.
Answer this simple question:
What could I, or anyone else, show to you that would disprove something in the Bible?
But, the fact is, for you to KNOW that the Bible is 100% accurate you would be required to be very well educated in a whole range of disciplines, from theology through to Syro-Palestinian archaeology, and no one, not even you has mastered all the subjects related to studying the Bible.
Another fact of the matter is that you will never learn even the basics of any of these subjects because to learn the basics requires someone to be open minded and to look at the evidence before they come to a conclusion. You will never grasp even the basics of, let’s say Syro-Palestinian archaeology for one simple fact, and it isn’t because you are not capable, it is because you will not study objectively, you will not read a wide range of materials. No one can grasp the basics of anything if they don’t look at the pros and cons during their introduction to a particular subject.
You may believe that you have looked at arguments against your stance, but you really haven’t looked at that many because you leave far too many questions unanswered and show in certain posts that you don’t know the basics of a particular subject, yet you still declare that the experts are wrong because what they say contradicts the Bible! It is pure unadulterated ignorance Faith for you to turn around and dismiss someone’s life work, say someone like William Albright, a conservative Christian scholar who devoted so much of his life to excavating the Near east and trying his best to fit the Bible into an historical context, is completely and utterly wrong simply because you say so! You have not got a clue about archaeology in the near east, yet the ‘Father of Biblical Archaeology’ was wrong about the date of the destruction of Jericho, or he was wrong about the date of Ai, or Lachish. But no, this guy has got to be wrong because you can click a mouse button and find a website written by some nutball who thinks he has refuted all the archaeological findings at Jericho in the last 140 years! You should be ashamed of yourself, insulting the dedication and lifetime works of thousands of academics who have devoted their lives to clarifying the historical and social world of the Bible and to make matters worse MOST of these archaeologists were CHRISTIANS! Albright was a conservative Christian, as was George Wright, Callaway is a Christian, Dever was a Christian, Glueck was a rabbi, the list goes on and on. Why don’t you give these people some credit, why don’t you read some of their works, why do you dishonour their work by so easily dismissing their work without having a fraction of the knowledge or dedication that these people had? Now, I am not a lover of William Albright, the man was a bigot and a racist, but I have to take my hat off to him when I realise just how much work he did in advancing the knowledge of the ancient near east. But what you are doing is basically the same as a ten year old kid going up to someone like Bill Dever and saying Oi Bill, your claim that there was no unified military conquest of Canaan is wrong.
Why? says Bill.
It just is
That is exactly what it is like.
And it continues through almost everything we have TRIED to discuss, you dismiss textual criticism because I don’t believe that anyway.
What sort of stance is that to base anything on?
You have made your mind up that the Bible is error free, despite the FACT that hundreds of thousands of CHRISTIAN scholars have shown exactly where there are errors in it. You cannot claim that the Bible is error free, you can claim that you BELIEVE it is, but to make an absolute statement like you have would require you to look objectively at the texts, and you are incapable of doing so.
This is not a matter of any of its being endangered, it CAN'T be endangered.
Faith, you are over 200 years behind the times, the Bible died in the 18th century. It doesn’t mean that it is a worthless collection of texts, it isn’t, but it certainly isn’t a perfect collection of texts when you take these texts out of their original context. The authors were not interested in recording accurate history, it was only in the 6th century BCE that anything resembling a critical history was being written by Hecataeus. The Bible is a minority report, it was written for specific purposes and accuracy of information was not high on the agenda.
Yes, people do get persuaded away from it by scientific claims, but it is THEY whose faith is weak, they lack faith in God's word,
BINGO! And here we have the confirmation. Faith worships her bible before she worships Jesus the Christ. Absolutely amazing! You continually put the Bible before Jesus, it is clear that you NEED an inerrant text because if there is one error in it then that opens up the possibility of more errors, and one of these errors might just be the resurrection of Jesus. I cannot imagine a weaker faith in God than you have.
and it's very sad -- some just fold up in the face of the claims of science,
Well, Faith, in the real world, not the fairytale land that you live in, people normally side with the strongest evidence. For example, we know for a fact that people don’t live for 969 years, and the remains of thousands of excavated tombs and graves confirm that even a few thousand years ago humans were lucky to live for fifty years, then how can you blame Christians for concluding that Methuselah didn’t live for 969 years. No doubt you will have some crazy excuse for that one, let me see, is it because genes were purer then, or was there a different atmosphere then, or some other equally ridiculous excuse, I am sure there will be something. But, you see, that is all that you require, any straw to grasp on to at all is fine for you, it’ll do nicely, it doesn’t even matter if it has any support or that it even sounds plausible!
The BIG advantage that science has over the Bible is that science can show you time and time again that what it says is true, or at least the best explanation we have based on the available evidence.
Then you say that people fold up in the face of science, fold up from what, from living life inside a fairy story? Do you seriously expect Christians to ignore the vast amount of evidence that contradicts the Bible texts? The Bible does not even ask you to take the texts literally, and as you agreed with the example of the talking trees, YOU even admit that some of it is not to be taken literally!
just can't hold onto an unprovable word of God in the face of the kind of aggressive attacks that come from the evos here.
Unprovable?????????
Why would anyone like to hold on to anything that is unprovable? You say that it is 100% accurate and you cannot prove any of it?
Faith MEANS holding onto something you can't prove.
Indeed, but that isn’t what you are showing in the literalist stance you are taking. What you are showing is that you faith in the bible means to ignore the evidence, stick your fingers in your ears and shout la-la-la, and then denounce the hard word and devotion of thousands of scholars because YOU don’t agree with them, despite the fact that you haven’t got a clue about the majority of the related subjects! It is breathtakingly, astoundingly ignorant.
That was the point of Jesus' saying to Thomas that those who didn't need to see him were blessed. It's believing the testimony and NOT requiring empirical proof that's true faith.
But Faith, you spend your whole life LOOKING for empirical proof of the Bible events! Why else do you post so much unsupported crap in response to criticisms? When faced with a problem such as the one I mentioned abut Jericho why don’t you just say that you have faith that God’s word is accurate and you don’t need evidence. You never do this, all you did was dismiss it with some silly worn out excuses.
For someone who doesn’t require empirical proof you have a strange way of showing it, you try to counter every argument about the Bible with empirical proof!
You somehow turn this obvious fact upside down. You try to make it into a character weakness as if we won't admit to being wrong.
Its not that you WON’T admit you are wrong, you are incapable of admitting it, you are so self deluded that your brain’s self protection system kicks in and rejects any negative information.
Also, I haven’t turned anything upside down, your faith in the Bible is paramount, because it is paramount you will accept any garbage that maintains this position, it doesn’t matter how puerile the information is, if it keeps this inerrant faade up, you will grasp it with both hands, all literalists are exactly the same so I am not singling you out. You have read and absorbed so much misinformation that you probably would require some serious psychiatric help to deprogram your self-delusion.
Uh uh, it's the ones who have the little faith who rush to "admit they're wrong" and betray Christ when they can't answer a challenge,
They aren’t betraying Christ, they are using the brain that Christ gave them. You may be surprised to know but you are the one betraying Christ, have you any idea how many people that you scare away from Christianity when they read some of the stuff you post? If anyone should be worried it should be the literalists.
As for answering a challenge, well there’s answering a challenge and there’s answering a challenge! To answer a challenge in the way that literalists do is really, most of the time, not really and answer at all. Saying that a coupe of 14C samples were flawed thus all samples are flawed is not an answer, giving an answer that we expect a ten year old child to come up with is not really answering the challenge either!
so that they can be in good with the majority opinion and get stroked by the Establishment.
Do you think it is an easy decision to admit that you need to review your stance on the Bible? It took me three years of anguish to finally reject God and the Bible, I bet it takes many Christians quite sometime, and some soul searching to alter their views. But, why should they be ashamed to fit the Bible into what they know to be true from the natural world, why should they have a frontal lobotomy in order to keep an inerrant Bible?
Witness Umliak. Can't wait to get rid of his humiliating former testimony to belief. Is embarrassed by it.
So, the guy has matured as a person, he has looked at the evidence and decided what is best for him, it’s his decision and I bet he based it on some very strong evidence.
Wants to get in good with the Science Guys, and the Science Guys rush to stroke him for it. THAT's weak faith.
That is strong faith, he knows that he wont be saved by worshipping a book, he puts Jesus first, the book won’t save you.
Putting up with the constant humiliation is what takes strength of character.
It is putting up with constant humiliation that has psychologically altered you. The constant humiliation has made you unreceptive to anything that contradicts your belief. See how well it fits in with my post, these psychiatrists are clever people, we can see their findings unfolding before our eyes here.
It takes a LOT more faith to believe in the literal flood than an allegorical flood,
It doesn’t take faith to believe in a literal flood, it takes cognitive dissonance, if any event in the Bible has more evidence against it then the Flood I would like to know what it is. There was no Flood Faith, every single related discipline we have has turned its back on it. It doesn’t take faith to believe in the Flood, it takes stupidity, because your lot never just say I have faith in a literal Flood, they always come out with complete shit to try and prove a literal flood! You don’t have faith in the Flood itself, you have faith in nonsense like water canopies, or comets full of water, or some other mindless drivel!
That's so obvious I'm amazed at your assertion of the opposite.
My conclusion is perfectly reasonable and supported.
It's not faith when you make something easy to believe by allegorizing it; it's faith when it's HARD to believe because everybody attacks it.
What does it take then when something has been shown to be 100% wrong?
You try to boil it all down to an abstract "faith in Jesus" but faith is faith in the whole revelation of God. The greater the faith, the more one puts up with the insults we get from you guys about it instead of giving in.
But, your problem here is that you do not have the original word of God! For fuxake, even Sunday school kids know that we have no original documents, no one knows exactly what the original texts said. And it is has been shown through extant texts that there are many manuscripts that have been altered.
Look at this table as an example:
Text MT LXX SP
Adam 130 + 800 = 930 130 + 800 = 930 230 + 700 = 930
Seth 105 + 807 = 912 105 + 807 = 912 205 + 707 = 912
Enoch 90 + 815 = 905 90 + 815 = 905 190 + 715 = 905
Kenan 70 + 840 = 910 70 + 840 = 910 170 + 740 = 910
Mahalalel 65 + 830 = 895 65 + 830 = 895 165 + 895 = 895
Jared 162 + 800 = 962 62 + 785 = 847 162 + 800 = 962
Enoch 65 + 300 = 365 65 + 300 = 365 165 + 200 = 365
Methuselah 187 + 782 = 969 67 + 653 = 720 167 + 802 = 969
Lamech 182 + 595 = 777 53 + 600 = 653 188 + 565 = 753
Now, what age was Lamech when he died, 777 as the Masoretic text claims, 653 as the Septuagint (Alexandinus), or 753 of the Samaritan Pentateuch?
You see, your stance is fundamentally flawed, you are taking a book as literally being God’s word when the truth of the matter is that the Book you have know has went through upteen editings, you are reading what men THINK should be in there, you are reading a Book that has had something taken out and some added purely because some guys changed it to suit their own particular views.
True, many of the scientific claims we can't answer,
But, you will still not even consider them! They cannot be correct at all can they if they contradict your folk tale book.
but that doesn't shake our faith, it just means Back To the Drawing Board because God's word is true and anything that contradicts it is not.
Yes, back to the drawing board to see what embarrassing claptrap you can make up, any nonsense will do as long as it solves an immediate problem. Thank the Lord that all Christians are not literalists, you would drag us back to where you did before, the Dark Ages.
And there are many who CAN answer them,
Yes, we have read their work, and most of the time we have pissed ourselves laughing at it.
so I know it isn't just that some of us don't have the knowledge to deal with this; they have to put up with your ridicule too.
But, they don’t have the knowledge, this is the problem, they look to you as if they have the knowledge but they don’t. The real experts ALWAYS tear them to shreds, if the Evo v Creo debate was a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it long ago.
No need to answer.
There is when you misunderstand everything I say.
Brian.
This message has been edited by AdminJar, 06-20-2005 02:28 PM
) I might not be a Christian today.
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