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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 7, 2013 8:15:02 GMT 10
One of Veritas's common dismissals of any Atheist website's attempts to show the Bible for what it is is to shoot the messenger by stating that the interpretation of the atheist of the Bible is somehow flawed. Well, what has he done about it? Nothing! We all know that the earth was not created in 7 days, but what does the most current version say? And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/So why TODAY, does the Bible still perpetuate this lie? Why haven't all of these supposed Scholars corrected the inaccuracies? And this is only one of the many inaccuracies. This is the Bible that is read to people in church, this is the Bible that you can buy form a bookstore or read online. Don't use the 'bad translation' argument until you fix the problem. |
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 7, 2013 15:55:20 GMT 10
Exactly Earl.
But if an Atheist misquotes the Bible, it's the Atheist's fault, not the fault of those who wrote and translated it.
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Post by pim on Apr 7, 2013 16:38:30 GMT 10
Hang on! You're atheists. I know that because you've said so and you're both men of honour and I know I can take you at your word.
So why should you care what any silly old cultural artefact says about the beginning of the earth and how humans got to walk on the face of it?
Australian Aborigines have their creation myths with Dreamtime and Rainbow Serpent. In fact a serious Aboriginal criticism of whitefella culture is that "Whitefella got no Dreaming". Their "Dreaming" defines their relationship with the land and what's more is central to the whole concept of native title to land. They say that their "Dreaming" is not something in a mythical past but is relevant to today with its songlines and its totems.
In the past we "whitefellas" used to dismiss blackfella "Dreaming" as ignorant superstition which would die out. In fact we took their kids away so that the kids would growup uncontaminated by this "Dreaming" bullshit. Today we call that cultural genocide and have considered this to be something to be atoned for. In fact the then PM of this country, in 2008, made world headlines by formally making an Apology in the nation's Parliament. I say "world" headlines because I was in Switzerland at the time and watched the Apology on Swiss TV. On Swiss TV! There was also a two page spread in a major Swiss newspaper explaining the background and what it all meant for a Swiss readership.
I'm sure that there's as little objective science and historical fact in the Aboriginal Dreamtime stories, in which a giant snake (the rainbow serpent) moved over the landscape shaping valleys and mountains, and totemic relationships between humans and other creatures were formed, as there is in the Genesis story in the Christian Bible. Not much objective science or historical fact ... but an awful lot of poetry, allegory and symbolism. There's richness there.
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 7, 2013 17:13:07 GMT 10
Hang on! You're atheists. I know that because you've said so and you're both men of honour and I know I can take you at your word. So why should you care what any silly old cultural artefact says about the beginning of the earth and how humans got to walk on the face of it? Why care? Because this lie is still being taught to children today! |
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Post by pim on Apr 7, 2013 19:10:54 GMT 10
So is Hansel and Gretel, The Little Red Engine, the Little Mermaid, Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella.
All of them morality tales with a bit of scary stuff with sexist wolves who eat little girls and bedridden grandmas, stepmothers being cast in a very unfavourable light, girls being unjustly penalised for their good looks, and cannibalism.
And yet we read them to little kids and they look back on them later on in life fondly.
In what way does the Genesis story traumatise kids that these "fairy tales" leave them not just unscathed but enriched?
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 7, 2013 22:22:03 GMT 10
But no-one represents Hansel and Gretel, The Little Red Engine, the Little Mermaid, Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella as being anything other than fairy tales.
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Post by Occam's Spork on Apr 8, 2013 8:23:50 GMT 10
....But they do teach an alternate version of "The Frog Prince", in science class, and present it as fact.
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Post by Occam's Spork on Apr 8, 2013 9:58:53 GMT 10
But no-one represents Hansel and Gretel, The Little Red Engine, the Little Mermaid, Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella as being anything other than fairy tales. True. Maybe there's a reason for that. |
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 8, 2013 19:33:07 GMT 10
So you can't comment on the topic, Dibley? You are the one that blames Atheists and Atheist websites for the fact that the current Bible is still littered with untruths due to Christians being incapable of bringing the bible up to date.
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Post by pim on Apr 8, 2013 21:09:33 GMT 10
unable??
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Post by pim on Apr 8, 2013 21:16:11 GMT 10
Slarti I couldn't get a response from Earl Grey to these points. They are germane to your "rationalist" position. Not having a go at you! Take this seriously! Here we go. This is what I posted (in vain) to Earl Grey: Did you see the program on SBS One last night on the fabric of the universe? There's the Newtonian view, which to this day informs your perception, and mine, of space/time. Then there's the Einstein view which starts to see space as "space/time", and as something that can be folded and twisted. And so on through to quantum mechanics with its particles that whizz in and out of existence and around each other and into each other. It's like there are miniscule versions of the Big Bang (mini Bangs??  ) happening all the time. It's as if "space" is "something" and the question is whether or not there really is "nothing". And I mean nothing - an absence of anything. I must confess I'm totally bamboozled by all this stuff and I really can't get past Newton. Thank goodness that for the purposes of our ordinary mundane lives Newton works just fine. But these eggheads from the cream of America's scientific establishment were even postulating that "reality" - whatever that is in this intellectual universe (!!) - could be two-dimensional and that what we experience as three-dimensional "reality" is merely a holographic projection. I tellsya, this is so mind-bogglingly fantastic - using "fantastic" as the adjectival form of "fantasy" - that the "Adam's rib" story and the "Rainbow Serpent" sound quite ordinary and unremarkable. I think your cosmological obsessions about the "God" thing kinda miss the point when you encounter this sort of stuff. There are physicists and other scientists at the top of the global game of physics and science generally who are having conversations that make the scenarios postulated in the Bible and the theological speculations of the Vatican sound like an everyday conversation about the weather! |
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 8, 2013 21:44:48 GMT 10
Damn that iPad auto speller! It should be "incapable'! - have fixed it so it now makes sense. |
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 8, 2013 21:50:52 GMT 10
I didn't see the program,but I don't see the world/universe as being as complicated as scientists sometimes try to make it. I see the universe as just 'being' and constantly changing through a series of totally random processes. Some of these processes will have similar outcomes, but they will still be random. Hence the Earth as we know it is the only planet that we have discovered that has life on it like ours (discounting the recently found small particles on Mars). But I most certainly do not believe that we are the only intelligent beings that exist in the universe. To do so would be to deny logic.
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Post by pim on Apr 9, 2013 2:50:46 GMT 10
(BTW - Pim doesn't deserve a considered reply whilst he adopts that bombastic bullshit tone of his.) Earl Grey, if I didn't know you better I'd say you were a little cross with me  Don't be cross with me over a little bombast. Strewth if you can't be bombastic on NTB, where can a man be bombastic! It's like farting on the loo. If you can't fart when you're enthroned on the loo, where the hell can you fart!! Come come my dear chap, you flatter yourself ... Oh I see! Because I find your critiques of the Bible to be low rent and shallow, I find myself defending the Bible. Therefore you respond by accusing me of perpetrating a fraud when I say I'm an agnostic and you accuse me of dishonestly masking a secret adherence to Catholicism. Wow! Quite apart from the fact that I'm bewildered that you believe (ahhh, belief again! It all comes down to faith!  ) I'd go to so much trouble to perpetrate a cheap subterfuge, I find myself wondering if you and I have the same understanding of "agnostic". If you deconstruct it you're left with Greek elements that basically say "I dunno!" Mate, what I heard those guys say on that TV show I've heard before. I know I've said that I have nephews, nieces and daughters with PhDs and it sounds as if I'm massaging the truth. But it happens to be the truth. For some reason when my parents put down roots in this country the harvest has come with their Australian-born grandchildren and this country has reaped a rich harvest. One of them, a nephew, is a plasma physicist who, after he'd finished his PhD at the ANU, did his post doc years working in CERN in Geneva. He married a Canadian girl and he teaches all that quantum mechanics and string theory stuff over there. Last I saw of him was in Geneva and he tried to explain the sub-atomic stuff that he was working on. I have to tell you, he failed. At least I coul speak better French than he did! I agree it's all very theoretical and esoteric, as Einstein's work on relativity must have appeared arcane and completely impenetrable (Newsflash! It still is - to me!). But these guys have taken it way beyond Einstein. Isaac Newton must have seemed bewildering to people who lived in the 1600s when the courts of the land were still trying and condemning people for witchcraft, and yet the technological innovations that gave the world the Industrial Revolution right up to WW2 would have been impossible without him. Can you remember your grandparents? Reflect for a moment: could our grandparents as young people have had any idea of what the 21st century world would be like that we're growing old in? I was in primary school in the 1950s. What would my parents, back then have made of ... what did you call it Slarti? ... an iPad auto speller? Or just a plain old mundane mobile phone! Someone living back in 1913, the year before WW1 started, would have had no way of knowing what the world of 2013 would be like. Now try to project forward to the year 2113. Impossible. But I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of practical application has been found for the work on particle physics, quantum mechanics, string theory and "folding" space. My point is that the universe is so vast and so unknowable that anything's possible. Basically I stand gobsmacked before the scale and the wonder of it all. I mean what I said: the conversations that physicists are having are so fantastic - in the literal sense of the word - that they make this "God" talk not much more remarkable than a conversation about the weather. How can I be expected to "know" the unknowable? I'm not prepared to state categorically, like Fat does or Dib, that their Biblical God exists. I don't pray because who am I to pray to? I might think of my kids or grandchildren and even find myself muttering please God don't let anything bad happen to them. And I make no apology for that! What is that but a way of uttering a heartfelt hope. When I read what Matt says about "prayer" I get the impression of someone bothering a divine being in order to manipulate that divine being. I could imagine, if indeed there is a God, that he'd swat someone who'd treat prayer as some sort of magic spell where you mutter incantations in order to "tap" into some "force". You'd say that was bullshit and I'd agree. Prayer is an attempt to get some sort of unity with the deity. How can I get close to a deity if I don't know that he is there? So prayer is problematical to an agnostic. You don't "believe" but you're not sure that you're right about your disbelief. Please don't conflate agnosticism with atheism. Because an agnostic, if he's a genuine agnostic, will find just as much to criticise in shallow atheism (and not all atheists are shallow - just some!) as he would in dogmatic biblical literalism. And now methinks I should retire for the night! |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Apr 9, 2013 8:52:58 GMT 10
One of Veritas's common dismissals of any Atheist website's attempts to show the Bible for what it is is to shoot the messenger by stating that the interpretation of the atheist of the Bible is somehow flawed. Well, what has he done about it? Nothing! We all know that the earth was not created in 7 days, but what does the most current version say? And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-Chapter-1/So why TODAY, does the Bible still perpetuate this lie? Why haven't all of these supposed Scholars corrected the inaccuracies? And this is only one of the many inaccuracies. This is the Bible that is read to people in church, this is the Bible that you can buy form a bookstore or read online. Don't use the 'bad translation' argument until you fix the problem. What more would you want me to say, Slarti? Until you study the original text, in it's language and cultural context, any comments you make on the scriptures can only be arrived from personal opinion. -Can you deny the websites you C&P from, have studied the scriptures from any other language than English? -Have any of them made ancient studies their career of choice? --Would you claim a person was a scientist, if the only exposure they had to the field was through a high school science textbook? - No Slarti, you haven't stumbled upon a new revelation. What you have is the anti-religious equivalent of a conspiracy theorist. That's all that needs to be said about the subject. |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Apr 9, 2013 9:09:49 GMT 10
Exactly Earl. But if an Atheist misquotes the Bible, it's the Atheist's fault. This statement doesn't make any sense. First off, you've just admitted it was a misquote. Secondly, If an atheist intentionally misquotes the Bible, who else's fault would it be? Obviously, the individual who misquoted it. -DERRRRR DERRP! |
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 9, 2013 18:52:06 GMT 10
Exactly Earl. But if an Atheist misquotes the Bible, it's the Atheist's fault. This statement doesn't make any sense. First off, you've just admitted it was a misquote. Secondly, If an atheist intentionally misquotes the Bible, who else's fault would it be? Obviously, the individual who misquoted it. -DERRRRR DERRP! Crikey, do you actually get the premise of this topic? It seems NOT! |
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Post by Occam's Spork on Apr 10, 2013 9:51:20 GMT 10
I get it, I just don't agree with it.
P.S.
1. The Hebrew word for 'day' 'Yom', doesn't necessarily translate to a literal 24 hour period. It can also represent an unspecified passage of time. (Much like when we say:"In your ancestor's day...")
2. The Hebrew language is full of parables, imagery, metaphors, and idioms. Stop reading the Bible, as if it were a newspaper!
Learn the language you criticize!
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 10, 2013 23:47:32 GMT 10
I get it, I just don't agree with it. P.S. 1. The Hebrew word for 'day' 'Yom', doesn't necessarily translate to a literal 24 hour period. It can also represent an unspecified passage of time. (Much like when we say:"In your ancestor's day...") 2. The Hebrew language is full of parables, imagery, metaphors, and idioms. Stop reading the Bible, as if it were a newspaper! Learn the language you criticize! No, you don't get it at all as your answer has demonstrated. You will get it when you can answer these questions for yourself: 1 - Who wrote the Bible? a) Christians b) Atheists 2 - Who translated the Bible? a) Christians b) Atheists That's a start, there's heaps more, but first we have to get you to think for yourself. |
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Post by fat on Apr 11, 2013 9:04:52 GMT 10
1 - Who wrote the Bible?
a) Christians
b) Atheists
For a large part it was Israelites (Jews if you like) and a few Atheists plus a bit by Christians
2 - Who translated the Bible?
a) Christians
b) Atheists
Bit of both - particularly of late a greater number of the scholars would be possible Atheist and Agnostic experts in linguistics.
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Post by slartibartfast on Apr 11, 2013 19:57:14 GMT 10
Do you have any links for these?
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Post by fat on Apr 11, 2013 23:19:40 GMT 10
Slarti - I don't have linbks - I have just spent the second batch of 3 days in an Old Testament class.
There are stories in the bible which are folklore (maybe not Athiest but likely not believers in the God of Jacob and Abraham and David)
As for translations - there are specialist linguists who know translation and history and who were employed on translation. The chief thing with translation is to get it as correct as possible within the bounds of different language limitations and cultural experiences. If the best bloke or woman is an athiest it is good to get that person on the team and so they did.
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) happening all the time. It's as if "space" is "something" and the question is whether or not there really is "nothing". And I mean nothing - an absence of anything. 
) I'd go to so much trouble to perpetrate a cheap subterfuge, I find myself wondering if you and I have the same understanding of "agnostic". If you deconstruct it you're left with Greek elements that basically say "I dunno!"