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Author Topic:   How the Bible Actually Works
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 18 of 137 (889658)
12-10-2021 7:59 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by PaulK
12-10-2021 11:07 AM


Re: Surprise Surprise
I wouldn’t go quite as far as Enns says here but he’s on the right track.
Enns writes:
Some Evangelicals bypass this challenge by seeking to undermine the historical claims of evolution. That is another matter entirely, and to which I say, good luck to you—as long as that challenge is done in an informed and principled manner: informed, meaning one has true professional training in the sciences being discussed and subjected to professional review; principled, meaning one is genuinely seeking after truth rather than pre-committed to defending truth as they need it to be?
That strongly parallels my own position which I've stated and held for decades; the summary statement of my position from my page, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION POSITION STATEMENT:
quote:
If you honestly and truly want to fight evolution, then at least do it right! Learn everything you can about evolution and then attack it, not some stupid strawman caricature of it. And do so honestly and truthfully!
By refusing to fight evolution honestly and truthfully, but rather using "creation science" instead, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot, dooming your cause to failure and your followers to losing their faith.
In all this time, I know of not one single creationist who has ever bothered to read it as they have instead attacked me viciously for things that I have done nor written.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 60 of 137 (889921)
12-15-2021 2:29 PM
Reply to: Message 27 by Phat
12-11-2021 10:27 AM


Re: Good Guidance from God?
You either trust God or you don't.
I'll use this as a springboard for something that occurred to me last night, so it will undoubtedly feel like a tenuous reply.
As I recall, you have repeatedly expressed trust in God to guide you. But it occurred to me that we would need to review the record of God's guidance to see how good that record is.
More specifically, my train of thought started with the Insurrection investigation and statements by Malcolm Nance (Nance’s Law of Intelligence Kismet: “Coincidence takes a lot of planning.”) -- as the Select Committee is uncovering evidence of high level planning for the coup which is now implicating acting members of Congress, the DC DA is filing a civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in order to use the discovery phase to uncover their sources of funding for their operations in the coup.
Thinking of Nance reminded me of his 27 Jun 2019 interview with Paul Rieckhuff of Angry Americans ("If you're not angry, you're not paying attention."). Rieckhuff is an Army infantry veteran and Nance a Navy retiree, both of whom had been in actual combat, so the interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05pNxZmxs8M&t=2219s) was an exchange of war and sea stories, mainly Nance's and mainly regarding Iran. A very interesting and informative interview.
Specifically the topic was how Trump was at that time pushing for going to war with Iran, so Nance not only recounted his own combat experience against Iranian forces (eg, Operation Praying Mantis, 18 April 1988) but also his intelligence assessment of Iranian capabilities and how that would play against our own forces (basically, Trump had no f*cking clue what he was going up against and thought we could just walk right over the Iranians, kind of analogous to Hitler thinking he would take the Soviet Union quickly and easily through Blitzkrieg).
The question of the then prospect of imminent war with Iran (and of Operation Praying Mantis) starts at 9:40 of the video. At around 11:10 he gets into his involvement in Operation Praying Mantis, specifically the Battle of Sirri Island. In the Battle of Sirri Island, an oil platform being used as a command-and-control post was destroyed and set ablaze, after which it was informally called "Sirri Lighthouse" ("which took about a year to put out."). As I recall from hearing it before but cannot find now, he said that the Iranians knew where they were because all they needed to do was to follow the smoke: a column of smoke by day and fire by night.
 
Which I thought sounded a bit too biblical. According to Exodus, God led the Israelites through the desert with a column of smoke by day and of fire by night, right? And it took them 40 years to be guided by God from Egypt to Canaan. Hmm.
So this morning I fired up Google Earth and measured the distance from Egypt to Canaan. Straight-line distance is about 300 miles, which is 100 leagues. Since one league represents the distance a person can walk in one hour (3 miles per hour), that journey should have only taken them 100 hours at best, which would translate to 20 days or less. Yet it took them 40 years. Even if we were to increase the distance 10-fold and limited them to an average of one mile per day (a rather extreme worst case scenario), that would still have taken only about 8 years, not 40! On a side note, a critic of creationist "arguments against gradualism" wrote that they were essentially making the same argument as the Exodus consisting of picking up the entire camp and moving it a few feet each day; that just simply isn't how things work.
What could account for them taking five times longer than an unreasonably worst case scenario? What other factor is there? The only other factor that I can think of is the fact that God Himself was personally guiding them.
Which would make God either a very incompetent or a very untrustworthy guide. He had to have been misleading them constantly, either intentionally or through incompetence (The Mountain Men (1980): "Haven't you ever been lost?" "Hmmm... been fearsome confused for a month or two, but I ain't never been lost!").
This god couldn't even find his way from Egypt to Canaan with both hands and a pillar of fire and you would trust him to guide you with that which is most important to you? If you were to call a cab for the airport and God was the driver, it could take you months or even years to get to the airport and even then you couldn't be sure that you were at the right one.
 
And by the way, how can evidence be presented that disproves a Deity which cannot be objectively quantified?
Disproof of an any deity is not the issue. It has never been the issue. There is no burden of disproof here, but rather a burden of proof and that burden is yours.
quote:
[When you search for God, y]ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
So what do you have to present to us that would convince us of your own personal heresy instead of someone else's own personal heresy. There are as many personal heresies as there are heretics (AKA "theists"). How is anybody supposed to be able to judge the different heresies out there without any kind of objective standards, AKA evidence?
Without evidence, without objective standards, theism is nothing but a bunch of made-up stuff. How could you expect any of us to be convinced by stuff that you have just made up? In a couple of years, my two-year-old grandson will be able to do as good a job of making stuff up as you:
quote:
"Who broke this lamp?"
"An elephant came into the room and broke it."
"I didn't see any elephant."
"It was invisible."
Edited by dwise1, : I had increased the distance 10-fold, not 100-fold

This message is a reply to:
 Message 27 by Phat, posted 12-11-2021 10:27 AM Phat has not replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 72 of 137 (889936)
12-16-2021 12:25 PM
Reply to: Message 71 by Tangle
12-16-2021 12:10 PM


I heard a psychiatrist talking about people that hear voices this week. It's virtually impossible to convince them that the 'internal evidence' they hear is delusional. No matter how obviously barking mad it is. And a lot of it is truly mad.
quote:
"Don't do what the voices tell you to do! They are not your friends!"
(Malcolm in the Middle S4E19, Reese's warning from personal experience to little brother Dewey)

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 91 of 137 (890038)
12-22-2021 10:30 AM
Reply to: Message 84 by Phat
12-22-2021 3:01 AM


Re: About characters in books....
Call me crazy, ...
I know this one: OK, you're a taxi.
No, wait, wrong punchline. OK, you're crazy.
 
quote:
"God is not what you imagine or what you think you understand. For if you understand, you have failed."
     (Augustine of Hippo )
Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 CE) is also known as "Saint Augustine," arguably the inventor of the Christianity. He obviously outranks you.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 84 by Phat, posted 12-22-2021 3:01 AM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 92 by Phat, posted 12-22-2021 10:40 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(3)
Message 97 of 137 (890045)
12-22-2021 12:00 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by Phat
12-22-2021 10:40 AM


Re: About characters in books....
So dwise1, why is the concept of Jesus as God (Given that at least One God *should* exist) so unreasonable.
No more unreasonable than any other claim of godhood. And no less so.
But the point of quoting Augustine of Hippo is to call into question of who elected you as the Oracle?

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 98 by jar, posted 12-22-2021 1:42 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 99 of 137 (890048)
12-22-2021 4:13 PM
Reply to: Message 98 by jar
12-22-2021 1:42 PM


Re: About characters in books....
Is there any reasoned argument to support the concept that at least one God should exist?
I believe that I've expressed my opinion on this here many times.
God is infinite; Man and Man's mind is finite. Anything even beginning to consider to approach the full scope of God would be infinitely beyond Man's ability to comprehend to any possible degree.
The main thrust of Christian thought (at least within Jesus Freakery of circa 1970 ... and beyond) is that there is an impassible gap between Man and God, which necessitates the Christ. Thus the Christ (which I differentiate from the personage of Jesus) was needed to bridge the gap between Man and God such that he needed to serve as an intermediary, the entire raison d'être for Christianity -- this imagery of "A Bridge over Troubled Waters" got used overly much. And the resultant gap between Christ and Man gave rise to Marianism in which the Virgin Mary came to serve as intermediary, as well as the various saints.
Even if an argument might be made that there was some initiator, and that initiator would be called a God, is there any reason to think the initiator would continue to exist after the instant of initiating?
I'm not a cultural anthropologist, but I feel certain that most if not all myths are based in some part to what we observe in nature.
The insect world seems particulary rife with examples. Leafing quickly past the females who immediately devour their mates immediately after or ever during copulation ... . I seem to recall some spiders where the parent who has been carrying the eggs around then becomes the first meal of the hatchlings.
How more epic could a creation be than to become incorporated into your own creation! Kind of like Tiamat, I would guess.
Any gods present to pipe in at this point?

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 Message 98 by jar, posted 12-22-2021 1:42 PM jar has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(4)
Message 121 of 137 (890105)
12-24-2021 9:49 PM
Reply to: Message 115 by Phat
12-24-2021 10:53 AM


Re: ian? an? Re: About characters in books....
So how is it obvious that GOD is unknowable?
[emoticon of a forehead palm plant]
BTW, I am a life-long member of the "Kill Clippy Club" and as such I view emoticons in much the same disregard, so just look at what you have driven me to with your inanity!
OK. The supernatural is outside of the natural, right? We cannot sense the supernatural let alone observe, study, detect, nor even determine any characteristics of the supernatural including its very existence, right? The gods are all supernatural, right? Therefore, we cannot sense the gods let alone observe, study, detect, nor even determine any characteristics of the gods including their very existence, right?
So what part of that do you still not understand? All that we can possibly "know" about "God" comes solely from what we ourselves and others have made up about such unknowable things. Otherwise, to raise an old metaphor here, how can you tell the difference between God and a bad burrito?
For example, consider the scenario in which you were born blind. What would you know about the color red? Or worse, the color chartreuse (I'm fully sighted with full color vision and that one is beyond me)? What could you possibly know about it, since you could never sense it yourself. Ah, but what about someone else describing it to you? But you live in the Kingdom of the Blind which completely lacks even that person with one eye who would be King. And yet you all talk about chartreuse all the time even though nobody has even the vaguest idea what it is.
And you've made me remember a 1970 movie, Start the Revolution Without Me, a broad parody of classics about the French Revolution which can be classified as a guilty pleasure -- a student of French history absolutely hated it for its gross inaccuracies and mischaracterisations, but much of the repartée is rather clever (my ex' favorite: "Make haste, Escargot!"). You remind me of the Revolutionaries' spy, who was blind. He delivered his report to their leader, Jacques (je crois que), who rewarded him with fine pastry -- actually, he shoved some random stale bread or some such into the blind man's hands, told him it was fine pastry, and the blind man blindly accepted what he was told and thanked Jacques profusely for his generosity.
Phat, you are that blind man. You'll believe anything that you're told or that you tell yourself. Gleefully munching down on pure crap and ever so grateful for that crap.
How is it obvious (and why only to you, unique among Christians) that Jesus life was more important than His death?
First and foremost, NOT JUST TO JAR ALONE, NOR IS HE UNIQUE AMONG CHRISTIANS! Well, maybe not among "true Christians" who are the furthest thing possible from being Christ-like! OK, so I'm not a Christian, but then considering the way that Christians are I am limited to the material that I am given.
Why should Jesus' life mean anything à propos his death? 33 years versus 3 days. 3 years ministry and teaching versus 3 days during which he just lay there doing and saying and teaching nothing.
So then you believe that everything that Jesus taught was nothing but useless crap? That all you need to concern yourself with is to say "Ah buleeve-a!" and, ZAP, you now have a get-out-of-hell-free card? Regardless of what you do afterwards? That there are no moral nor ethical components to Christianity. Why, if you decide that some "non-Christian" (ie, anyone who believes any differently from you in the least part) is deserving of death, then you will "follow Jesus' commands" and shoot that sucker dead? That has happened far too many times and each and every time it was Jesus telling them to pull that trigger.
Are you really telling us that Christianity is so utterly bereft of morality and spirituality? That it is so utterly empty? Then what good is it?
jar writes:
Remember that Germany and Italy and Japan and Poland and Austria and the US and England were ALL religious. And the majority were also Christian.
Is the majority of the Republican Party Christian?
Do they consider themselves to be Christians? I'm sure they do, though instead of being actual Christians they are the near-exact opposite, "true Christians"™. Actual Christians do actually believe Christian doctrine whereas "true Christians"™ are only interested in gaming the system, in exploiting all the legalistic loopholes, and to use their "faith" as justification to hate and even work against those they just don't like. Despite their avowed reverence for the Bible, "true Christians"™ not only have obviously not read it but also act and speak in opposition to what it says. And to top it all off, they worship as their Messiah not Jesus, but rather an almost literal fake-Golden Calf, Trump, who is readily identifiable as The Beast whose mark (MAGA) they gleefully wear on their foreheads.
With the possible exception of worshipping Trump, you have repeatedly demonstated to us that you are a "true Christian"™, not an actual Christian. That is what everyone has been challenging you about and each and every time you have rejected actual Christianity.
Do they resemble the Christians in the US during both wars?
Iraq and Afghanistan? Which two wars are you talking about? We've had so many.
I'll assume you mean WWI and WWII, the first of which involved virulent hatred for anything German and the second presaged by huge support for the Nazis. Indeed, just about the only pre-war opposition to Hitler and the Nazis came from the Communist Party. And American Christians during WWII just continued to persecute others unabated when instead we needed to all pull together and unify for the war effort.
What point are you even trying to make?
Did German Christians prevent the rise of Hitler?
They helped to bring Hitler into power, "Gott Mit Uns" and all that. There's also the 1933 Reichskonkordat, a treaty between the Vatican and the Nazi Regime guaranteeing the church's rights in Germany. It's still in effect and was used in the 1990's against a student group, Bunte Liste Freiburg, to arrest and convict them for blasphemy because of their posters protesting the Church's opposition to birth control.
This is a side note, but I've also read an article on Nazi race theory. It showed that their race theory was firmly based on creationism and the idea of polygenism (the idea that the different human races are not related to each other but rather are the results of separate acts of Creation -- I was surprised to later hear the exact same polygenetic ideas being used by American racists).
Of course, there were some Germans who did oppose the Nazis and fascism. I would assume that some of them were Christians with a conscience, but most of the anti-fascists worked within the only party which opposed fascism, the Communist Party -- gee, just like in the pre-WWII USA. As far as we can see, the vast majority of German and Austrian Christians supported fascism and Hitler -- rather like we are seeing in the USA now.
(and don't lie to us and tell us Hitler was Christian. You will know them by their fruits. )
Well, he was! As were most of the Nazis, especially the most fanatic ones.
Though I do find it refreshing to finally encounter a Christian who is aware of the Matthew 7:20 Test. Certainly no Christian I've mentioned it to had any idea what I was talking about, nor could even bother to look it up. Obviously, they hadn't read their Bibles nor, if they had been the rares ones who have read it, did they believe what they had read.
So apply the Test. A friend at church (UU), Gary, did and it changed his life. He had been a fundamentalist Christian who every day and all day long had to turn a blind eye to everything around him that contradicted. Over time, the mental effort to constant filter everything in order to keep himself deceived led to mental exhaustion. So he examined his religion and applied the Matthew 7:20 Test. His religion failed -- remember that the Test dictates that even one evil fruit marks that religion as evil and it should be cut down and thrown into the fire (a tree/bush metaphor is used). He now describes himself as a "complete atheist and thorough humanist" and he finds that to be infinitely more spiritually fulfilling than his Christian faith ever did. Applying the Test changed his life.
Apply the Test. It could change your life.
Did Japanese religion even count towards anything positive? (Although Hirohito *did* help end the war for them) Douglas MacArthur was a "bigger" god than Hirohito!
Hirohito did make the decision that no other Japanese official ever could: surrender. Every other Japanese official and subject was committed through their direct loyalty to the Emperor to never surrender but rather fight to the death. Only the Emperor could have ever made the choice to surrender. Singling him out for praise for doing something that he had to do and only he could do it would be like praising Pence for "saving democracy" by overseeing the count of the electoral votes (HINT: he had no choice in the matter, though he did try to find some reason, any reason, to shirk that duty).
And Hirohito was an actual god, or at least the direct descendent of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. MacArthur only thought that he was a god.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 115 by Phat, posted 12-24-2021 10:53 AM Phat has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 127 by Phat, posted 12-27-2021 3:41 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 129 of 137 (890139)
12-27-2021 11:46 AM
Reply to: Message 127 by Phat
12-27-2021 3:41 AM


Re: ian? an? Re: About characters in books....
According to tradition Jesus was natural.
So then what does that tell us?
quote:
All gods are supernatural.
Jesus was not supernatural.
Therefore, Jesus was not a god.
QED

But you just tried to deflect and divert. Because I wasn't talking about Jesus!
Here it is again:
DWise1 writes:
OK. The supernatural is outside of the natural, right? We cannot sense the supernatural let alone observe, study, detect, nor even determine any characteristics of the supernatural including its very existence, right? The gods are all supernatural, right? Therefore, we cannot sense the gods let alone observe, study, detect, nor even determine any characteristics of the gods including their very existence, right?
So what part of that do you still not understand? All that we can possibly "know" about "God" comes solely from what we ourselves and others have made up about such unknowable things. Otherwise, to raise an old metaphor here, how can you tell the difference between God and a bad burrito?
So what I was telling you was (edited slightly for far greater clarity): All that we can possibly "know" about anything supernatural comes solely from what we ourselves and others have made up about such unknowable things -- that includes all supernatural entities, imagined or not, including "God", which everybody makes up for themselves anyway.
But instead of responding to the point that I was actually making, you chose to weasel out of it. If you have no response, then just admit that you don't.
But then you also ignored the rest of what I had said (extra emphasis added):
DWise1 writes:
For example, consider the scenario in which you were born blind. What would you know about the color red? Or worse, the color chartreuse (I'm fully sighted with full color vision and that one is beyond me)? What could you possibly know about it, since you could never sense it yourself. Ah, but what about someone else describing it to you? But you live in the Kingdom of the Blind which completely lacks even that person with one eye who would be King. And yet you all talk about chartreuse all the time even though nobody has even the vaguest idea what it is.
You have the audacity to quote "tradition." But what else is "tradition" except for everybody before you who had made claims without having the vaguest idea what they are talking about? IOW, making up stupid sh*t, but since they've been repeating that stuff for so long and everybody repeats it then you accept it without firing off even a single synapse. Goebbels' Law in action: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” (a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels).
And almost every time someone repeats one of those lies, they start with "Everybody knows ... !" Like when I got a cold email which started with: "As any good scientist will tell you, the Sun burns half of its mass every year." -- absolutely false (actually, half the Sun's mass is in its core and it's in the core that the sun "burns its fuel (AKA hydrogen fusion) losing about a tenth of a trillionth of the sun's mass every year, nowhere near half) but at least it led me to one of Kent Hovind's worst false claims.
You were issued a brain. Please start to use it.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 127 by Phat, posted 12-27-2021 3:41 AM Phat has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 137 of 137 (890261)
12-30-2021 2:18 PM
Reply to: Message 135 by ringo
12-30-2021 11:44 AM


Re: About characters in books....
What I don't understand is: when did being touched (ie, crazy) become a good thing?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 135 by ringo, posted 12-30-2021 11:44 AM ringo has seen this message but not replied

  
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