Senate Christianity Discussion Thread

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/himalaya.html

So either science concludes the mountains were formed 40 to 50 million years ago or the floods created them 6000 years ago...

 

The first article mentions it is possible to find 400 million year old marine fossils up there. The second cites no scientific facts.

 

Fossil age is determined radiometrically, it wouldn't matter how "fast" they were formed.

 

This is G-d tricking you of course...

 

Come on and answer me this: Experts agree that at the quite measurable rate of desertification, the Sahara, the oldest and largest desert, began desertification about 4,000 years ago. They agree that the oldest and largest coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia, began forming about 4,000 years ago. If the earth has been, hypothetically, stable for millions of years, why are there no larger deserts? Why no larger coral reefs? Unless there was some sort of worldwide cataclysm about 4,000 years ago.

Radiometric dating is so full of holes, it thinks Mt. St. Helens erupted millions of years ago. Two different parts of the same fossilized mammoth were radiometrically dated to be hundreds of thousands of years apart. Live snails are marked as a million years old and such. PLEASE don't come back to me with radiometric dating.

 

Even if you want to cite water pressure, you have to take into account the fact that marine biology is sort of able to handle water pressure.

 

Desertification of the Sahara was essentially complete by 3400 BC. The Great Barrier Reef is estimated to be 6000 to 8000 years old.

So here's the better question: why are your numbers so wrong?

 

cuz he got em from a creationist home school textbook

 

I'd love to see a source on all of those, but I suspect they'll all be creation "science" website articles. Still, I must applaud the sheer tidiness of the sophistry.

 

No, every science textbook I ever brought home was full of lies. Doesn't matter when I was in public school, or in online school.

 

I'll concede this is an excellent explanation - my numbers would also be wrong if I listened to this guy.

 

This guy is sitting in jail for preaching the truth. I'm more privy to believe truth from a man being persecuted by the world than by someone more inclined to follow the religion of old-earth evolutionism.

 

Tax fraud is the truth, now?

And hey, I'm plenty persecuted - I once got a rock thrown at me because I kissed another man in public.

 

Even if he preaches the gospel correctly, that doesn't mean he is accurately reporting scientific opinions about the age of the Sahara Desert. There are many great preachers and teachers that never even graduated from high school. I wouldn't question their religious credentials for a second.


But I also wouldn't try to learn collegiate-level subjects from them.

 

Where's your evidence for these claims?

 

Also, the Sahara's been greening up over the last thirty years or so. Even if it weren't, it's expected to become green in 15,000 years' time.

Also, desertification does not work like that.

 

And you are also failing to take into account that if the waters had risen above the heights of Mt Everest, the Ark and all of its inhabitants would have frozen to death. Also:

 

how did i INSTANTLY know it was fiscal malfeasence when he said "sitting in jail for preaching the truth" lmao

 

i.) i believe that jesus was a prophet. i'm not sure if he was any more divine than anybody else, but his teachings ring true to me, much truer than the teachings of other religious leaders. i consider myself a christian because, in the same way that i appreciate and find meaningful jesus' teachers, i appreciate and find meaningful the christian tradition as a whole. when i read my bible, i find truth expressed that i haven't found elsewhere, or at least not expressed as well. i believe in basic christian teaching, original sin, etc. but i don't believe what i believe because the bible says it. i believe what the bible says because that lines up with my experience and the experience of other people.

ii.) i am saying that scientific explanations are my first screen for whether or not something in the bible can be considered scientifically true. you seem to be stuck on this idea of historical truth as the only kind of truth, like most fundamentalists, and it's a little frustrating. every time i provide you with an answer or explanation that is kind of complex, you consistently try to break it down into simplistic yes or no options without allowing room for the possibility that the answer to your question might be more complicated than that. which is shocking and a bit frustrating coming from a mind like yours. i'd think you'd be able to appreciate the complexity of certain things, or, at the very least, the difference between something like historical fact, scientific fact, and spiritual truth. because there is a difference there. and since you apparently need things spelled out for you in clear, block letters, i'll say it again:

i believe that the bible contains truth, and is divinely inspired (though certainly not the only collection of writings that can claim this). whether or not job actually existed or whether or not the earth was literally made in six days or whether or not god commanded his chosen people to commit genocide or whether or not jesus actually walked on water does not have any bearing, whatsoever, on the truth i have found in the bible (read: spiritual truth).

concerning the reality and nature of spiritual truth, i believe it's entirely consistent with a scientific worldview to allow for inspiration. in my eyes, science boils down to this: you look for explanations of phenomena, and when you find an explanation with enough evidence for that explanation to become compelling, you treat that explanation as fact until you find a better explanation with more compelling evidence. in my experience, the scientific explanations for art, love, et al. aren't compelling enough for me. i've had experiences where i've felt moved, inspired. when i read a great poem or stare at the stars long enough or step outside of my small little world to help somebody else or create something, i feel something bigger than various neurons firing and cells clicking in the correct sequence or whatever. and the bible and greater christian tradition provide a much more compelling explanation for why i feel what i feel. in my experience (admitanntnly limited), science doesn't have much to say about the stuff it can't measure and it can't analyze. also in my experience, there are parts of the human condition (love and ****) that can't be measured and can't be analyzed. i'm not saying we shouldn't try -- i'm actually really curious to see what's happening in my brain when i'm feeling the kind of feeling's i've talked about -- i'm just saying that i've yet to see an explanation that is better than the bible's concerning the issues of artistic inspiration, altruism, love, etc.

iii.) openly embraced? when i read acts, i see two distinct camps formed in the early church. one led by peter and james (judiazers) and one led by paul. they had fundamentally different theologies, agendas, and understandings of basic concepts (circumcision, clean vs. unclean, whether one must be jewish to become a christian, etc etc.). i'm not saying that i disagree with the majority of paul's teachings, because that's not true. again, he says some things that i believe are absolutely accurate concerning the human condition and the nature of our relation to god etc. i'm just saying he was probably an *******, too, and i don't agree with everything he says. and it's misleading (or, at least, a shallow interpretation) to suggest that peter and james accepted paul with open arms and agreed with him on everything. very distinct understands of god, and very distinct opinions concerning some very important issues. to be honest, i'm kind of bummed that you don't seem to get that. again, it seems like you prefer the simplistic to the complex.

does that help?

 

It helps clarify your position somewhat, yes.

But in a lot of other ways, it doesn't help at all. You repeatedly accuse me of "wanting to simplify things." But I don't see how you reach that conclusion. It's been like pulling teeth to get you to say anything at all. How many times did I try to engage you on the issue of genre in Biblical literature before you said anything?

The reality is that all you've gotten from me, is a sentence or two about any one topic in passing. Certainly, the only thing I can get from you is about one independent clause. If you want to talk about something in-depth, and sound out each others actual opinions, that would require being willing to engage in a discourse. We can do that now. How exactly do you see a large divergence between Paul and James/Peter? In the 15th chapter of Acts, literally all three of them advocated the position that Gentiles were under no obligation to follow the Jewish law.

EDIT: Let us be clear. Before we continue for another moment in this thread, let's be honest about the historical record. I am perfectly aware of your view that the emotional and psychological insights you gain from religious texts are their primary importance, so you don't feel that historical accuracy should be an issue. I haven't, to my recollection, ever attacked that. Even in response, all I did was defend the validity of my own views on their own merits. You, on the other hand, charged into this thread accusing other forms of Biblical interpretation of being "stupid," "shallow" and incompatible with "thinking people" among many other insults. In light of all this, are you honestly saying that you want to accuse me of being intolerant or not trying to hear you out? Really? Is that honestly the conclusion those facts helps you draw?

 

If you are not taking the Biblical account of creation literally, then there probably is no need to reconcile a Biblical account of creation with a non-Biblical one. Mainly because you would probably be using such a creation myth for its correct purpose, the purpose that it was overwhelmingly used for in primitive, pre-modern societies: as an aid to mythos, being more useful in the search for meaning rather than the search for fact.

However, if you are asserting in a society which has progressed past about 1860 (that is to say, pretty well all of them on the planet bar the most isolated tribes in the Amazon or deepest darkest Alabama) that the Biblical account of creation is--
(a) literally true and
(b) using it as a support for the proposition that the remainder of the Bible is therefore also literally correct and must be followed to its letter as a result
--then you have no choice but to confront what modernist thought and the work of science over the past couple of centuries or so have to tell us about the correctness or otherwise of the Bible and how the natural world works in objective reality. This is doubly the case if, as the hard-literalist school often advocates, the Bible's terms and ordinances are advanced as appropriate secular law to bind your fellow human beings who do not share those beliefs solely because the ordinances follow God's own natural law as set out in the Bible which must be correct because of its literal accuracy and truth. I am referring specifically here to the hard-literalist school's outright hatred and antipathy towards homosexuality and its rather frequent work to demonise, proselytise, and where possible make illegal the conduct of homosexuals. I am also referring, as I did before, to the anti-Semitism which emerges from the hard-literalist school with a specific if not singular basis arising solely from one line in the Gospels alleging in effect that Judaism from the day of Christ's death would forever bear the guilt and responsibility for Christ's death.

As for the suggestion that an examination of present day traditional societies that still employ pre-modern modes of thought demonstrate a fulfilled and happy life: yes and no. Spiritually mythos has its place, it's badly missed in the west, and it's often better practiced in more traditional societies. But on the other hand, Ter Ellington debunked the myth of the noble savage decades ago. Life in pre-modern, traditional societies is invariably brutal and short. Many, particularly but not exclusively in the Islamic religious context, are repressive against women -- all of which attitudes are typically justified by religious modes of thought: Eve created as Adam's helpmate and not his equal, for example. The Quran puts husbands a legal degree above wives. A woman's testimony counts for half that of a man's. And so forth. Western secular (and Christianised) society does not countenance that view anymore, or at least does not impose that belief as a legal maxim for the adjudication of legal affairs: the Catholic Church doesn't let women become priests, but neither does that stricture have any legal effect in wider society pertaining to the status of women.

In addition, when it comes to pre-modern modes of thought brought back from the modernist West to knowingly create bigotry: Uganda. Take a five minute look into what is happening to homosexuals there, take a further look into those who agitated for that phenomenon to take place and then tell me that pre-modern modes of thought invariably lead to a fulfilling and happy existence and never require rethinking or intervention.

The more relevant point, though, is this: you can't be pre-modernist in a modernist society. Not intellectually. As Ricky Gervais rather eruditely put it, "You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts." Especially if you propose your own facts as a basis upon which to impose your belief system on others who don't share that belief, or upon society at large. If you would propose that society discriminate against, if not vilify, homosexuals, Jews, or women on the justification that the Bible demands it and the Bible is to be followed because it is literally correct and the word of God, then you must confront and provide humanity at large with a rational basis to toss aside Ockham's Razor and the modernist mode of thought.

 

There's a genealogy in Luke as well. Since several of the names from Joseph to David are different, but David, his father Jesse, and the names further back are the same, some scholars say that the Matthew genealogy represents Joseph's descent through Abraham down to David and then through David's son Solomon. Whereas the Luke genealogy Mary's descent through David's son Nathan, Solomon's younger full brother. So, Jesus would be descended from David through both His parents if He was Joseph's natural son. Of course, He is not actually Joseph's son, but He is still a descendent of David.

 

Which surely begs the question of why Joseph's lineage was included in the first place? Joseph's ancestry is meaningless as far as Jesus is concerned. Furthermore, at the time, women were irrelevant in regards to lineages; only the male line was considered.

 

Yeah, but ... DAT ANNE BAXTER