Senate Christianity Discussion Thread

You're right, anakinfansince1983. It was a different guy wrote wrote that. My apologies.

However, Moses, Isaiah, ect were human, but when they were writing the books, God told them what to say, and they recorded his words exactly.

 

What is the difference between the Bible and other books for you? Why do you think so much of it is pure fiction? Do you even read it and try to understand it, or do you simply read it and dismiss it?

 

the only "outside-the-bible" proof for that would be a personal revelation from a divine being, so i think you're pretty safe

 

then again there's always sleep-paralysis, gas leaks, DMT, brain tumors...

 

Skywalker8921 when you listed prophets, why don't you include Muhammad and Joseph Smith in that list? Or Bahá'u'lláh? What about Judith, included by Protestants but not Catholics? Or Esdras, included by Eastern Orthodox, but not by Protestants and Catholics? Or the Gospel of Thomas, not included in any?

 

could it be... SATAN?! YOUR SPECIFIC CULTURAL CONTEXT?!?!

 

Can't it be both?

 

The collected works are not all pure fiction, but many of them are heavily laced with fictional elements, social commentary, and historical and religious revisionism.

 

Lowbacca_1977 for some people they do seem to be, yes

whats interesting to me here is that skywalker thinks you're treating the bible different from other books, when in fact she's the one treating it as different from all other books, such as, say, the holy qur'an or the guru granth sahib. why do you imagine those books are any less trustworthy in their extraordinary truth claims, Skywalker8921. i mean, i have an idea, but i think it would be interesting to see what you post about it

 

Did god tell King Josiah then to carry out the Deutoronomic reforms?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah

If the Bible is supposedly god's word, both immutable and infallible, why must there be revisions?

 

To be fair, (and if my memory of those passages is correct) if you're operating under the assumption that the Bible is "infallible," Josiah would be reimplementing religious ethics from a lost set of writings, not something that they generated during Josiah's time period. While one of the stronger current theories suggests that the book of Deutoronomy is a forgery or some kind major revision or religious and political commentary, there's no real way to know for certain. It seems perfectly plausible and fits much of the evidence well enough, but there's still room for a fundamentalist to take an alternative approach.

 

[quote="Jabba-wocky, post: 50905018, member: 857699Hmm. This is probably the most intriguing point in the thread to date. I have to admit I haven't taken time to piece through it in detail before. But if you'll excuse me for embarrassing myself, I'll think aloud about the approach I'd take. It seems easiest to fix the timeline where we have single leaders. So Moses's tenure should be easy to establish, knowing that he left Midian at age 80. Likewise, we can lock in the length of time that Joshua led. On the other end, Solomon's reign was uncontested, so we have at least those four years. Where I think we could run into trouble is how people count the oft-flirted but never quite realized civil war between Benjamin and Judah at the beginning of David's reign. The Judges are another major point of difficulty, and I saw you mentioned that there are probably major and minor ones. That seems reasonable. Have you considered the possibility of, erm, co-Judgeships? Especially for those who only had one major noted event (eg Deborah) it is perhaps the case that the end of their stated time overlaps with the next one serving? Have you been able to work out much so far?

It's certainly one of the most intriguing historical periods. I think there's a lot going in the late David/Saul interactions especially. Really lets you dig into these issues of the multiple implications of God's will, and our own duties in that regard.[/quote]

Moses was 80 at the time of the Exodus and died at the age of 120 at the end of the 40 year wilderness period just before the people crossed into Canaan, so that's 40 years accounted for right there. In Joshua 14, Caleb the son of Jephunneh says that he was forty when Moses sent him and Joshua with the ten to spy out Canaan and forty-five years have passed since then, so it seems reasonable that the first part of Joshua at least runs from the entrance to Canaan to five years later, so 45 years accounted for.

Unfortunately, only Joshua's age of 110 at his death is given, so we have no way of knowing how old he was at the Exodus or the entrance into Canaan; according to Judges the Israelites didn't start turning to idols until after the deaths of Joshua and the elders who outlived him and had seen the works of God, so we have to go to the other end of the spectrum.

480 - 40 (wilderness wanderings after Exodus) - 5 (entrance to Canaan and beginning of conquest) = 435 years accounted for.

Construction of the Temple began in the fourth year of Solomon's reign, 480 years after the Exodus. II Samuel 2:5 pegs David's reign as being 40.5 years - 7.5 years in Hebron over Judah and 33 years over all Israel, but the last few months of his reign have Solomon as Coregent since he was anointed and crowned before David died, so I'm going with the round 40 mentioned later on in II Samuel and Chronicles for David's reign. The first seven years run parallel with the brief two year rule of Ishbosheth in Jerusalem and the five years of confusion that followed before David became King of all Israel.

435 - 4(year of Solomon's reign that Temple construction begins) - 40(David's reign) = 391 years accounted for.

Acts 13:21 pegs Saul's reign as 40 years also.

391 - 40(Saul's reign) = 351 years accounted for.

The remaining 351 years in the timeline between year 5 after the start of the conquest and the beginning of Saul's reign, though, involves some guesswork, since there's really no firm anchor points at either end for the date of Joshua's death in relation to the Exodus, or how old Samuel was when he died and when during Saul's reign it happened.

In Judges, it has:

18 years service to Mespotamia, 40 years rest(Othniel); 18 years service to Moab, 80 years rest(Ehud); 20 years service to Canaan, 40 years rest(Deborah); 7 years service to Midian, 40 years rest(Gideon); 18 years service to the Philistines and Ammon, six years rest(Jephthah); 40 years service to the Philistines. That would account for 327 of the remaining 351 years, leaving only 24 years missing - and that is evidently a problem, because it doesn't leave enough time at either end of the spectrum to accomodate Joshua's death or Samuel's service; Samson's 20 years judging Israel evidently entirely occurs during the Philistine oppression.

Jabba-wocky

 

You can't exactly rely on those figures as calendars were different back then. Even our calendar is different from the original Julian calendar which was revised by Pope Gregory.

It might be minutiae, but if our definition of a year s different to the Bibles it stuffs everything up.

 

You raise an excellent point, Katana. However, that actually doesn't raise a problem for us here. In the first place, we know the design of the Israelites' calendar, so we can make any adjustments needed between their lunar system and the Gregorian one. In the second, and more importantly, we're only counting in their calendar years. Since the same calendar was used to calculate 480 years as was used to date each king's reign, we don't need to make any adjustments. I'll otherwise need some time to chew through the above.

 

Anyone who relies on the literal interpretation of the Bible as the foundation of their worldview should watch this video and read all of the various academic works which have been published by Dr Bart Ehrman, who happens to be one of the most respected biblical scholars on the planet and who was also a fundamentalist christian in his early career. From an historical perspective, the Bible is an extremely unreliable source. I would put more stock in 'personal experience' as a source of reliable evidence.



http://www.bartdehrman.com/

 

Heh, no worries, Jabba-wocky. It's quite a lot for me to digest, too, but I've always been interested in history, so this is an intriguing challenge for me to puzzle out.

 

I figured this was appropriate to interject into the discussion.

 

I posted this before but for some reason it disappeared: the Catholic Church sees no conflict between evolution and the Bible...except where humans are concerned as they're a special case.

Not sure whether to feel good about this or not.

 

I'm not timmoishere. At least try to get who you're talking to correct.

You think you can just throw away science by claiming scientists are flawed and quoting random passages a book? Do you even want to debate in good faith here? Are you even trying?

 

Science is so flawed.

Yet Skywalker8921 will still go to a doctor when he's sick. Funny that.

 

Science is so flawed.

But hey, computers and internet! That must work with magic, right?

 

This is what I was trying to touch on earlier. People act as if a thread was created called "ITT I Will Rigorously Disprove Science Through Objective Data"

In fact, science came up as about a third order tangent in a discussion about the internal consistency of Christianity as a religion. Those who've bothered to engage in the discussion have mostly done so with explicit, repeated mentions that they weren't really putting a lot of weight into academic science, but would be happy to provide you with their personal interpretations of how science might reconcile with the religious texts they actually were trying to discuss. The complaints about how unconvincing these responses have been thus overlook the fact that they were never trying to be very convincing. They were polite enough responses to questions asked, using the same framework those posters had been using all along: one that discusses Christianity from the viewpoint that it is true, and that its sacred texts are legitimate.

This doesn't represent "hypocrisy" or poor debating, or anything of the sort. It's just a weird dynamic where there are abortive attempts to shift the framework of the discussion and incredulity when the other party doesn't cooperate.