I want to say yes, but I suppose that would get me in trouble with y'all. I mean, in those years I of study and research I have considered astronomical, historical, archaeological, scientific etc. secular sources which confirm as well as challenge my position. I've compared histories of other religions, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto and Taoism, and many of their texts, as well as looked at the history of the pagan influence in modern apostate Christian teachings. All sorts of things like that, if that is what you mean. Yeah.
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I want to say yes, but I suppose that would get me in trouble with y'all. I mean, in those years I of study and research I have considered astronomical, historical, archaeological, scientific etc. secular sources which confirm as well as challenge my position. I've compared histories of other religions, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto and Taoism, and many of their texts, as well as looked at the history of the pagan influence in modern apostate Christian teachings. All sorts of things like that, if that is what you mean. Yeah.
Well, first of all I don't think it is circular, and secondly I wasn't using it as an argument for the validity of the Bible. Consider this.
Sarpedon
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DLH said:
As I suspected, another one-man cult, just like dozens of others we've seen here.
Since religion is based on faith rather than evidence, all it takes is one person believing differently to spawn a schism. When reason and evidence are excluded, there is no way to resolve disagreements. This has happened throughout history, the only thing separating someone like DLH and someone like Martin Luther or Fra Dolcino is the ability to recruit followers. This is why new cults are constantly being spawned. It is my belief based on what I have seen in this forum and elsewhere, that religious non-conformers like DLH are common. From this pool of non-conformers, some occasionally manage to gather a following, and so become a cult, or sect if you are trying to be polite. Most of these don't seem to survive their founders. But occasionally, the conditions are ripe and the cult institutions are durable enough to create a lasting legacy, and so we have our major religions. I think it is a mistake for historians to classify new religions as being the products of conditions at their time, but rather that schism and non-conformance are the base condition of religion, and that conditions merely allow this latent tendency to ripen.
James Brown
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Jimmy Higgins
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That would be the implication.
Did you try to use stories written several hundred years later, using imagery from the earlier story as evidence of this being prophetical? That would be a reverse prophecy. That is nonsensical and utterly baseless.
And this is what you want to discuss? Proper capitalization? It the Story of The Fall. It is a title, titles get capitalized.
dystopian
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You're going to have to justify that belief; since it obviously is.
You believe in the bible > Why do you believe in the bible? > Because of what the bible says -> Therefore? > Therefore you believe in the bible > Why do you believe in the bible though? > Because of what the bible says > etc etc.
That link does nothing to disprove the fact that it's circular; it simply makes a circular argument, then asserts its not circular. It provides no reasoning for its assertion; and tries to deflect from this setting up a strawman argument, pretending that the reason we think of the argument as circular is because the sentence "you can't prove the bible using the bible" uses the word 'bible' twice.
Let me ask you something. If you read something in a science journal or textbook, how do you validate it? Or do you?
dystopian
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You don't really understand science, do you?
A scientific study doesn't validate itself the way you think the bible can; it is validated by experimental data, observations, and through the exhaustive peer review process. So sorry, but no; you didn't come up with a "aha gotcha!" argument. The two examples are not even remotely equivalent.
Sarpedon
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Anything published in a scientific journal or textbook is, by definition, based on repeatable experiments. The fact that I, personally, do not repeat the experiment doesn't mean that someone else doesn't.
The bible is not like this. It is a collection of mythology, folklore, history and hagiography. Some of the history has been confirmed. Some of the stories are based on historical events, but no more reliable than the typical Hollywood 'based on a true story.' As far as the other stuff, its really easy to see. Jews being god's chosen people, and given a plot of land in the middle east, for example. Really? In a Universe where the visible portion is 91 Billion light years across and contains millions of galaxies, and countless stars and innumerable planets, the Lord of the Universe is in the business in doling out Middle Eastern real estate by the square mile? Or maybe someone made that part up. I don't need to actually have been there to know that isn't true. All I need is the perspective to see that the Universe, and even just our Earth is far, far too big for the petty godling imagined by some primitive tribe millenia ago to have made. I can see enough from my backyard with my little brass telescope to know that.
The bible is not like this. It is a collection of mythology, folklore, history and hagiography. Some of the history has been confirmed. Some of the stories are based on historical events, but no more reliable than the typical Hollywood 'based on a true story.' As far as the other stuff, its really easy to see. Jews being god's chosen people, and given a plot of land in the middle east, for example. Really? In a Universe where the visible portion is 91 Billion light years across and contains millions of galaxies, and countless stars and innumerable planets, the Lord of the Universe is in the business in doling out Middle Eastern real estate by the square mile? Or maybe someone made that part up. I don't need to actually have been there to know that isn't true. All I need is the perspective to see that the Universe, and even just our Earth is far, far too big for the petty godling imagined by some primitive tribe millenia ago to have made. I can see enough from my backyard with my little brass telescope to know that.
Kharakov
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Like someone made up the WoW universe and its backstories.
You mean you want scriptural support?
If any of you ever answered a fucking question instead of telling me why I'm asking the question we could do this a great deal faster.
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Do what faster?
If you're waiting for folks around here to suddenly accept the Bible as everything you believe it to be, then we'll be here quite a long time indeed.
If you want a pat on the back for your efforts to arrogantly talk down to us "heathens" then you'll wait even longer.
If you really want to speed things up, perhaps you should go to another forum where you'll be lauded for your self-congratulatory scriptural lectures.
bilby
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Scriptural support isn't worth a bucket of cold sick.
Scriptural support means someone wrote it down. How do you know if that writer was right? You can't take his word for it, or you would have to believe everything anyone wrote down.
The way to tell if a piece of text is right or wrong in what it says is to test it against other evidence. If there is contradictory evidence, then the text is likely wrong; If there is no evidence either way, then it should be viewed with caution.
Scientific papers don't just say what the researchers think is true; they set out why they think it is true, and most importantly, how other people can go about testing the statements for themselves.
The Bible doesn't do that explicitly; but it does make statements that are testable against reality - and where it does, it gets things wrong a lot of the time.
So it is demonstrably not a good guide to reality where we are able to test it against reality; which strongly suggests it will also be a poor guide to reality when it makes un-testable claims.
The important difference between science and scripture is that when science gets a prediction about reality wrong, it changes to fit the new information. So science is in a state of constant improvement, and constant imperfection. While scripture declares itself to be perfect, and as such resists any attempt to improve it when new information comes to light.
When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must include the truth. Science has been eliminating impossible ideas for over five hundred years. Scripture has been trying to pretend perfection for three times that long. Ideas that seemed reasonable to people when the Bible was written are today known to be impossible. But they remain a part of scripture, because scripture has no means to correct errors.
Please provide 1 instance where the Bible got it wrong. And provide the evidence that it is wrong.
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You have to ask yourself why that was done. As I posted elsewhere it was done to establish a people of an imperfect law that foreshadowed a more perfect law and to provide the Messiah who would bring that perfect law about. In the course of events that opportunity was broadened to all people of all nations.
James Brown
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No. Since your scripture is the source of your claim, we need something else to verify it. Something that would confirm the truth of your claim even by someone who has not read your scripture.
When Galileo wrote down that the moon was pocked with craters, others did not confirm that by reading what Galileo wrote down. Even if Galileo wrote down that claim in two different books, that wouldn't verify the original claim. Something else--something independent--was needed.
Otherwise it would have been just an unverifiable claim.