Since it IS Christmas time......

Two points to clarify.First: No, the Torah is not the Old Testament. Rather, the Torah is part of the Old Testament. The Torah (AKA "the Pentatuch", AKA "The Five Books of Moses", AKA "The Law") consists of the first five books of the Bible, which we know in English as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy (in Hebrew, the names derive from how each starts; eg, Genesis would be "In the beginning").Second point: Peg was not even referring to the Torah. This is for two reasons:1) Daniel, the prophecy under discussion, is not in the Torah, but rather is in Former Prophets, the second of the three sections of the Tanakh (AKA "The Hebrew Bible"), those sections being Torah, Former Prophets, and Writings."Old Testament" is a Christian invention, which the Church had largely derived from the Tanakh, though with some changes, mainly in choice of which books to include and to not include. As you start to study the Bible, you should take a look at the question of the various canons and how the Catholic, Protestant, and Hebrew bibles differ from each other; the Wikipedia article, Old Testament - Wikipedia would be a good place to start.2) And most particularly, Peg was referring to the Talmud, which is the quite literally encyclopedic body of rabbinic literature which represents a few centuries of rabbinic study and commentary on The Law and on other aspects of Judaism in the first centuries CE. And commentaries on those commentaries, and commentaries on those commentaries, etc -- kind of like some threads in this forum. If you want to know how the rabbis approached Scripture (ie, the Tanakh) and attempted to interpret it, go to the Talmud. For more introductory information in this subject, go to the Wikipedia article on it at Talmud - WikipediaBTW, you are going to attempt to discuss what the Bible says, you should study it as you say you intend to. It really is beneficial, as is evidenced by the fact that that is what turned me into an atheist over 45 years ago.Edited by dwise1, : minor clean-up in aisle 3

True, there is a plethora of far better ways to waste one's time, most of which are also more productive and beneficial.It's just that when one chooses to fight on a particular battlefield, one must be prepared for that battlefield. If one isn't prepared, then one should choose a battlefield for which he is prepared.

True enough and if you can take the punishment then the more power to you. As for me, I do have much better ways to waste my time, such as learning C# through non-trivial projects and completing a couple dozen more Navy correspondence courses before I'm forced to retire.However, consider that theology and apologetics have been at it for more than a millennium (they will claim two megs, but I think that the past few centuries and even the past century has seen more action than in the previous couple 2 millennia or so). They have been arguing circles around each other and around themselves even for many times longer that you have been around. The same pretty much goes for apologetics, which I believe has had multiple man-millennia applied to it. If the people you go up against are anywhere close to being worth their salt, they will be able to draw on all that wasted man-power and will be able to run circles around anyone who even thinks of going up against them. Doesn't make them right, but they will still be able to chew up their unprepared opposition piecemeal without even breaking into a sweat.Think back to the 1970's and the travelling "creation science" debate show. Dr. Henry Morris and Dr. Duane Gish of the ICR and other professional creationists would go on the debate circuit and their local supporters would recruit local "evolutionists" (AKA "evilutionists") to debate these professionals in a skewed format dictated by the creationists themselves -- Dr. Eugenie Scott of the NCSE describes the situation in her "Debates and the Globetrotters" (No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/debating/globetrotters.html. What happened was that all those opponents entered into the fray thinking that they would be talking science and instead they got hit by creationist nonsense. Now, of course they knew that what the creationists were saying was nonsense, but how do you communicate that to the audience (which would usually be filled by creationists) in the extremely limited time that you are given? A large part of the problem was that these opponents were hearing those outrageously false creationist claims for the first time. So what happened were the Committees of Correspondence (which led to the creation of the NCSE as a national clearinghouse for the CC's). Local teachers and scientists who had been burned by creationists started reading the creationist literature, researching their claims, and sharing their findings with each other. As a result, by 1980 the tide had turned and creationists started losing the debates.The point is that in order to argue against someone, you need to know what their position is and how to argue against it. Since those you would be arguing against have a massive body of information/misinformation to draw from, you would need to be familiar with that massive body of information to know how to respond. Yes, you could just throw yourself against their claims, but how effective would that be? For a popular analogy, consider going up against a Death Star without knowing about that 3-foot opening that represents its only vulnerability.