bilby
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Why YEC can seem plausible
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DrZoidberg
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Ehe, what? Yes, when things are wrong reality tends to verify that wrongness. Is that a problem?
Learner
Veteran Member
Indeed, I know of atheists who belief in ufos and abductions and that information is hidden from us.
I know of atheists, not being Christians believe there are elite masons, illuminati et al, who do demonic things.
I suppose most of us across the board should be on wiki.
No problem
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
A New argument?
Different cultures have creation myths so god must exist?
Th ancient Hebrews did not invent monotheism. During captivity they were exposed to Babylonian myths and stories.
In the 90s after the Indian Ocean tsunami an island resident was interviewed. The island got flooded.
He said htere was an old island cultural myth that said every once and a while god cleansed the Earth with a great wave of water, and if you see water receding from the shore run for high ground. Which he did.
A good example of a natural phenomena unexplained without modern science in the past being turned into a myth. Natruarl event attributed to a god.
Noah, aka Gilgamesh.
What Joseph Campbell showed n the Power Of Myth series was that all myths all reflect the same human atributes in different cultural metaphors.
In Asia images of Buddha reflect the regional physical characteristics. The western European image of Jesus is fair skinned and blonde haired and blue eyed.
When I was a kid in a black friends home I saw an image of a black Jesus, too young to understand it then.
Myths share common themes because they are craeted by the same sorts of human beings.
Different cultures have creation myths so god must exist?
Th ancient Hebrews did not invent monotheism. During captivity they were exposed to Babylonian myths and stories.
In the 90s after the Indian Ocean tsunami an island resident was interviewed. The island got flooded.
He said htere was an old island cultural myth that said every once and a while god cleansed the Earth with a great wave of water, and if you see water receding from the shore run for high ground. Which he did.
A good example of a natural phenomena unexplained without modern science in the past being turned into a myth. Natruarl event attributed to a god.
Noah, aka Gilgamesh.
What Joseph Campbell showed n the Power Of Myth series was that all myths all reflect the same human atributes in different cultural metaphors.
In Asia images of Buddha reflect the regional physical characteristics. The western European image of Jesus is fair skinned and blonde haired and blue eyed.
When I was a kid in a black friends home I saw an image of a black Jesus, too young to understand it then.
Myths share common themes because they are craeted by the same sorts of human beings.
funinspace
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I'd like a non-creationist sourcing for such quotes. The creationist sites I bumped into don't provide any sourcing for their claimed quotes and statues. One, people make up shit all the time, or are deluded and dream up weird shit (a la Zecharia Sitchin, who did provide some sourcing for his fantastical fairy tales he believed). Two, what are you talking about in 'can't get any earlier than that? Did you mix up BC and AD? The Ming Dynasty was from 1368 to 1644 A.D, frickin very young.
Source or Chinese texts posted.....
Stautes of the Ming Dynasty. Can't make up that up or get any earlier than that.
I couldn't find an online English source for Shi Jing that could be searched. But lots of English translations of the book physically exist. If I wanted to demonstrate such information/quote was true, I would cite the book release, and page number of the quote. I have done this before when showing that C.S. Lewis called the Deluge a fairy tale within God in the Dock. You pull quotes from un-named creationists sites and appear to unquestioningly believe the information. Climate researchers publish their work, have it peer reviewed, and demonstrate details about the climate going back hundreds of thousands of years. This you seem to dismiss with a wave of the hand.
My example from 'God in the Dock', paperback reprinted in 2000, Part I, chapter 4, page 58:
"Jonah and the Whale, Noah and his Ark, are fabulous; but the Court history of King David is probably as reliable as the Court history of Louis XIV. Then, in the New Testament the thing really happens -- as a historical Person, living in a definite place and time. If we could sort out all the fabulous elements in the earlier stages and separate them from the historical ones, I think we might lose an essential part of the whole process. That is my own idea."
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ideologyhunter
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Shout out for the trees? All of earth's trees, killed off?
funinspace
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Such issues just get white washed away invoking unmentioned miracle, number 42, out of the 69 generally needed to float the whale of a tale... It's kind of like the Terminator movie, where the hero has to go back in time naked, and without anything; thereby making it next to impossible to falsify the story, per the psychologist.
ideologyhunter
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I know. The flood story is such a STORY, so invested in storyhood, that it's like beating a very dead horse on the skull with a tire iron to point out all the absurdities. But the fact that some Christians (and I assume very few Jews) feel that they have to defend this tale they've heard since toddlerhood, or their whole reality will come down like a condo in Miami, makes it an irresistible target. I say, keep swinging your tire iron, we'll beat this thing to a pulp eventually.
DrZoidberg
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I think the Jews really did invent monotheism. Other cultures did indipendently as well. But I think anthropologists mostly agree on that. It was a slow, step-by-step evolution from paganism, to henotheism to monotheism. But I think it's hard to argue this particular evolution was imported from another culture.
Egyptian monotheism came and went a thousand years before Jews came into the scene. Akhenaten was only rediscovered in modern times.
Also Joseph Campbell is only a good tool for writing fiction. His theories are very Eurocentric. I think with modern eyes he's a bit obsolete today
James Brown
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funinspace
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Just like how the platypus got back to Australia...magic...maybe unmentioned miracle #9
steve_bank
Diabetic retinopathy and poor eyesight. Typos ...
I am puzzled. If so, how did all the racial variations occur along with civilizations and language in such a short time string with Noah and crew? Very strange.
Elixir
Made in America
Sons of Ham! Volcanoes! Galloping continents!
There are perfectly rational explanations for everything. Except miracles. Miracles can't be explained.
I'm still awaiting an explanation for that human diversity thing too. Not so much about the current picture, I just find the incest implications of the biblical account kinda repulsive. It does provide possible holy rationale for some of our Southern "traditions", though.
ideologyhunter
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Rewrite needed. I'd do it myself but I'm immersed in Complete Prose by Woody Allen and I think that Woodyisms would creep in (not that that's a bad thing, but I think most ministers would lose it if they heard loud, imperfectly suppressed horse laughs coming from their congregations.)
But I suggest some touch-ups by professional Hollywood script doctors, maybe some with experience in the Harry Potter or LOTR series. One avenue: bring in the Nephilim, the mysterious ur-giants of Gen. 6 and Numbers 13, weird superhuman beings who lived before and after the flood and mated with the daughters of men -- that alone would widen the gene pool. There's just no end to the possibilities if you accept that stories set in the olden-timey days don't have to make even a scintilla of sense.
bilby
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What was the point of a flood anyway? If God wants everyone except Noah and his family to vanish, why doesn't he just vanish them? Why wipe out all the animals, bar an insufficient number to allow their species to recover without further miraculous intervention? Why miraculously create and then destroy a vast volume of water, then have to miraculously keep all the terrestrial plants alive, and miraculously move the marsupials to Australia from the Middle East, and miraculously accelerate micro-evolution, and miraculously do all these other band-aid fixes that each create more inconsistencies and require more miracles to solve them?
Why kill babies who haven't yet had a chance to displease God, and almost all the animals who presumably also haven't done anything wrong?
If there are evil people who need to vanish, just vanish them. You're meant to be omnipotent, for fuck's sake. Any good being would try to avoid collateral damage, and an omnipotent one would (by definition) succeed.
It strikes me that God, like his apologists, is determined to make such an incompetent and dumb clusterfuck of His attempts to get things done that no reasonable or sane person could possibly believe in Him having done it that way.
Why kill babies who haven't yet had a chance to displease God, and almost all the animals who presumably also haven't done anything wrong?
If there are evil people who need to vanish, just vanish them. You're meant to be omnipotent, for fuck's sake. Any good being would try to avoid collateral damage, and an omnipotent one would (by definition) succeed.
It strikes me that God, like his apologists, is determined to make such an incompetent and dumb clusterfuck of His attempts to get things done that no reasonable or sane person could possibly believe in Him having done it that way.
ideologyhunter
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I have heard fervent believers say that God must demonstrate his might and power. That's probably close to what Attila the Hun's press secretary said about him. Or Genghis Khan's attorney general about him. (I'm picturing William Barr in a yak fur hat sticking his wattled head out of a yurt and praising Genghis.)
bilby
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If anyone who displeased God simply crumbled to dust in front of everyone the instant they transgressed, I don't think anyone would be in the slightest doubt about His might or power.
But demonstrations of power are only necessary if people doubt. An omnipotent God could remove all doubt without any demonstration at all. And if he doesn't want to remove doubt (due to 'free will' handwavery or somesuch), then any and all demonstrations of His power are counterproductive.
Yeah, this racial bit is hard to credit.
So if these boy Ham Shem and Jepthah were the fathers of all humanity, but they are brthers, maybe it means their wives were caucasian, asian and Black. But either way this means that Ham’s offspring, for example were all ONY mating with each other, brother lying with sister, while Sem’s kids did the same, etc. ANd their kids, only mating with their first cousins - or more siblings. Meaning that hey would have us believve that genetically, ONE set of parents sired each race. With three unrelated women, then the mtDNA of each race would be completely different.
It’s so shallow and crumbly, the whole premise.
funinspace
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The Tower of Bullshit splains the whole silly confusion regarding racial diversity...happened around 2200 BC. Tons more shit the human archeologists and historians have faked or got wrong about the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese...