Are you religious? If so, what religion? Why?

[blotsfan 2,112]

Then why say that God hardened pharoahs heart rather than pharoah hardening his own heart like it does at other times?

[Thanatos 2,847]

Then why say that God hardened pharoahs heart rather than pharoah hardening his own heart like it does at other times?

 

I didn't realize it said that in this passage, you are correct. I shall have to look into this one.

Edited October 23, 2012 by Thanatos19

[BwareDWare94 723]

What is the best way of going about reading the Bible? From start to finish, certain books first? To anybody who's actually read it, how would you suggest? Is there any way but to commit to it and go forward?

[Thanatos 2,847]

Start to finish, in either the English order or the Hebrew one, doesn't matter.

 

Just read 3 chapters a day, I believe, and you will be finished in a year.

 

Here is a good site to give you some different ways of doing it: http://www.ewordtoday.com/year/

[BwareDWare94 723]

Start to finish, in either the English order or the Hebrew one, doesn't matter.

 

Just read 3 chapters a day, I believe, and you will be finished in a year.

 

Here is a good site to give you some different ways of doing it: http://www.ewordtoday.com/year/

 

While I'm more knowledgeable about the Bible than most people I know around here (most of them don't even know what Sacrilege is), I'm tired of having a ceiling on what I can and cannot discuss, so I think I will read the good book.

[blotsfan 2,112]

And you can skip Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Those are just boring laws that Christians don't follow anyways.

[BwareDWare94 723]

And you can skip Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Those are just boring laws that Christians don't follow anyways.

 

I fully expect Leviticus to horrify me, but I'll have read the entire thing if I actually follow through with this.

[Thanatos 2,847]

And you can skip Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Those are just boring laws that Christians don't follow anyways.

 

Deuteronomy has a lot more than just laws in it, and it has plenty of things Christians are still expected to follow. (Love the lord your god with all your heart, soul, and everything, for example.) Leviticus needs to be read as well, it gives you context on the Israelis and their life.

[BwareDWare94 723]

Deuteronomy has a lot more than just laws in it, and it has plenty of things Christians are still expected to follow. (Love the lord your god with all your heart, soul, and everything, for example.) Leviticus needs to be read as well, it gives you context on the Israelis and their life.

 

I expect the Bible to challenge me in ways that many books don't, and I've been significantly happier than in the past year or so of late because I've started going to church again, but only to churches with priests I feel I can learn from and pay attention to throughout their homilies. When a priest can't give a decent speech, church becomes a chore.

[blotsfan 2,112]

I meant numbers, not Deuteronomy btw. Not quite used to the English names since when I learned it it was hebrew

[Phins4life 271]

First off, there are very very few people who take the Bible literally, word-for-word. The Bible has clear genres, hyperboles, metaphors, and examples scattered throughout. This does not mean that I do not believe the Bible is 100% inerrant. But there are clearly poetic passages that are not meant to be taken literally, and to take them literally is to interpret them incorrectly. It would be like going into Shakespeare's poetry and trying to decipher it as if it had a literal meaning.

 

Well if that's the case, then with all due respect none of my questions were aimed at you . It's fundamentalist YEC's I'm focused on, since they tend to be the ones who fervently hold onto a strict literal interpretation.

 

We are not God's chosen people, not sure where you're getting that from. That would be Israel, and that would also be an OT thing. If you mean simply that humans are chosen by God whereas apes are not, I do not see the argument that similarity = relation.

 

Fair enough. I worded my comment poorly to begin with. As for the final thought, I'll get to that here shortly.

 

The whole idea comes from misapplying the technique of translation to try to translate the Hebrew word yom as strictly meaning a 24-hour day. I mean, the very first time the word is used, it doesn't mean a 24-hour day: "God called the light day." Same word. And then in chapter 2, "And this is the account of the heavens and the earth, in the day they were created..." Again, same word. In neither case is it possible that it means a 24-hour day. Those who insist on interpreting the six days of Genesis as being 24-hour days are pushing an strict English translation on a very flexible Hebrew word.

 

This entire issue is made way too much of. The text is ambiguous, it doesn't matter to salvation, and no one should be dogmatic on the issue.

 

I have no disagreement that there could be misinterpretation within this text, since it's very difficult to compare a relatively young language to a very old one without having some misunderstandings in the process. However, I will point out that the first chapter gives a clear distinction of the passage of a day being defined by night becoming morning. You have to admit this can get confusing. Calling it symbolism at this point is kind of hard since the distinction made is one even we agree with today. You have a better handle on the Hebrew language than me, so I will let you fill in the blanks I've obviously left here.

 

As a bit of a tangent to this, I'll also ask what your take is on how old some of the people in the Bible are said to be. Living more than 900 years is pretty logic-defying. Based on what we can observe today, it seems like no warm-blooded creature is capable of living that long. Our bodies are way too fast paced. We simply aren't built that way. And to believe we had a better chance of living longer back then strikes me as a stretch of the imagination. Every day was a fight for survival for early mankind. Making it that long with so little medicinal knowledge, competition for food with other creatures/people, and other such daily obstacles just isn't realistic to me. I went back and did some math, and it seems more plausible that a year back in those days could have been a lunar cycle, or something else that they could track before we had an organized calendar system. Wondering what your thoughts are, and if this is perhaps another word that has been lost in translation that means something else.

 

The one thing I have a problem with is man evolving from apes, and that is something that I don't see myself changing. (Evolution in general is a different matter, it is simply man's evolution that I believe would conflict with the ideas presented in Genesis.)

 

The idea being that mankind is more divine than other creatures because he is created in God's image? But why can't evolution apply to man if it applies to all other creatures? We aren't so special that we don't bleed and die like all other animals on this earth. Why wouldn't it just be even more evidence of his greatness that he could mold man into his own image from a more primitive ape? It would require one to use a non-literal view once again, but there really isn't any crime in that since you're willing to accept that other parts of the Bible are poetic or symbolic in nature.

 

While you are correct that similarity doesn't equate to relation, from my particular stance it shows where we came from. The hands, the eyes, the general skeletal structure. Even behavior. It isn't just one feature, but so many things that lead me to see a bit of myself in the chimp or gorilla on the other side of the glass. Or perhaps that would be the other way around. "The indelible stamp of our lowly origin." But I think it's safe to say that we differ in opinion a little too much to be swayed one way or another on this point.

 

Nope, I have no problems with carbon dating. Just to inform you, though, carbon dating is only useful back to about 50,000 years

 

Which is arguably more than enough when discussing mankind's timeline, to include a global flood, I would think.

 

Well this is really quite simple. I'm not entirely sure I believe in a global flood, but the question of Noah's ark has always been a ridiculously easy one to answer, and not at all my problem with the flood.

 

Quite simply, there weren't two of every species in existence. Noah takes, for example, two wolves on the ark, and we get the amount of dogs that we have today. The boat is ginormous, and more than capable of holding 2 of each species you would need for adaptation to give us the rest.

 

I have to adamantly disagree with you here. There's nothing simple about evolution, adaptation, or the amount of speciation that would have to occur in such a limited time frame. I guess I would first have to ask how long ago you actually think the event occurred before going into a rant. But assuming it happened less than 10,000 years ago, the amount of macro-evolution that would have to take place just isn't possible based on what science has uncovered to this point. Add in the severe genetic deficiency of every subsequent generation of each species from all the inbreeding, and it just isn't a reasonable argument.

 

It's very possible that not every species we see today was in existence in Noah's day, but there were still too many to fit two of every species into a boat roughly 450 feet long, 45 feet high, and 75 feet wide. It just couldn't be done, especially not when he was commanded to take 7 pairs of each clean animal.

 

Problems With a Global Flood

 

This writer makes several good points, and he does it much more eloquently than me. The logistical problems presented are the ones most convincing to me, and for the most part I honestly don't see too much bias on the way he goes about presenting it. There are admittedly some points where he makes his disdain for certain viewpoints evident, but you will almost always have that from both sides.

 

What I think is most likely is that the flood was not global, but was considered global by a people who had not yet seen just how big the world was. The Mediterranean might has well have been the edge of the world for them. It also makes the logistics of loading up a boat that size with local fauna easier to wrap my head around.

 

 

I do believe most people who think that Noah's flood was global tend to believe that it was during this time that the continents broke up, and when most of the seas were formed. Thus, there would not be many bodies of water to change salinity.

 

But again, there is far more evidence that the movement of the continents was gradual, over millions of years. If this event did occur within the last 10 or even 20 thousand years, the oceans were already in place, meaning a catastrophic alteration in salinity, which would in turn kill any creature that was not designed to adapt from salty to brackish water in a short period of time. Remember, we're talking about enough fresh water to cover the tops of mountains. Many of the species we see today would be extinct.

 

I think God is more than capable of performing such an act, yes. There's nothing hard to believe about an all-powerful God letting Jonah survive that long- the question that is behind this question is whether or not there is an all-powerful God who is interested in this world.

 

Whether or not this story literally occurred is actually irrelevant to the larger story of Jonah. There are some who believe that he died and was resurrected, in order to link him to Christ more firmly, as Jesus uses his example in the NT as the only sign that will be given to "this generation." I see nothing wrong with either view, the language appears to be intentionally ambiguous in the original Hebrew throughout Jonah.

 

There are few creatures that fit the description of "great fish" that could pull this off without divine guidance. At least, of the creatures that would have likely been in existence in that age. Basking sharks, sperm whales, and Great Whites are the most common candidates I have read about. Baleen whales are unlikely because they don't have the right sized esophagus to pull it off. They would choke to death. Great white shark seems unlikely because, as a rule, not many living things eaten by a great white make it to the stomach in one piece. Sperm whales are capable of pulling it off, but if I recall correctly there is no recorded incident of a man being swallowed whole, so this really can't be proven or disproven. But based on their behavior and habits, it isn't likely. I don't know the first thing about basking sharks so i won't even comment on them. Although I do know they're fucking huge.

 

The literal interpretation is indeed relevant to my original post, regarding whether or not one believed it is physically possible for a man to remain alive in the digestive system of a living creature, underwater, for 3 days. I have heard the theory that he is linked to Christ, and honestly it would make the story easier to swallow. But it's still an interpretation that has to be taken entirely on faith, in my opinion.

 

 

 

For the record, after thinking about it for a while, I think I'm closer to an "agnostic atheist" line of thought than just pure atheist. Not sure if that's right, though. I don't have proof that no deity exists. I simply haven't seen the proof that one does. So I go with the default position of "seeing is believing, and burden of proof is on the theist to convince me." Not sure how that is categorized, so I'll leave it at that.

 

 

 

 

For what it's worth I think that the flood was global. And their were species of dinosaurs on the earth before/after the flood, and dinosaurs just ended up dying out from various reasons.

 

Why do you think it was global? The evidence supporting such a catastrophic event is practically non-existent. If it had happened, there would be widespread evidence of its occurrence. Soil content, sediment layers, fossil records, land features. All of these things would show much stronger support if it had actually happened, and more importantly, it would be consistent. Greenland just wouldn't look like it does today. There wouldn't be nearly as many huge glaciers. That much rain would have helped melt the Arctic circle down quite a bit. We would see a much more even distribution of erosion to all the mountains of the world as a result of the violent flooding. The Rockies wouldn't be so much taller and rockier than the Great Smokies, for example.

 

Dinosaurs before and after the flood? No. Suspending the laws of nature for a moment and assuming the global flood occurred, you would either have to believe that modern man lived millions of years ago or that dinosaurs lived less than 10,000 years ago. The fossil record supports neither, nor does it support the coexistence of unadvanced humans with creatures who likely would have been higher on the food chain. And then there's the logistical nightmare of having to fit all the dinosaurs on a boat with limited space for all the other creatures Noah supposedly took with him, where each level (assuming they were built evenly) was less than 15 feet in height. If there were any dinosaurs around in Noah's day, they got left behind. But there is no fossil evidence that there were, so it's kind of a moot point.

 

And then there's the weather aspect of it. It is not possible for the entire earth to experience a rain event that would dump well over 50 feet of rain per day for 40 days. Natural balance of the earth's atmosphere dictates alternations in high and low pressure systems, which are influenced by the Coriolis force and latitudinal circulation belts. It IS, however, very possible for a series of lows connected to each other to pass over the same location for several days, or even weeks. It wouldn't produce nearly the amount of rain needed to flood the world, but it could flood a local region under the right synoptic setup. This is one of the bigger reasons why I think any cataclysmic flood that occurred would have been confined to the world that Noah and his people would have known. You're still really pushing it though, since the Bible says that even the mountains were not visible. Ararat is over 2 miles high. Even if you lowball it to the average moutain heights of between 3-6K feet in Turkey, that's a lot of fuckin' water. Thing is, even at the source region of the story, there is no ironclad evidence of such an event.

[Thanatos 2,847]

Well if that's the case, then with all due respect none of my questions were aimed at you . It's fundamentalist YEC's I'm focused on, since they tend to be the ones who fervently hold onto a strict literal interpretation.

 

Even a fundamentalist YEC does not believe that everything is to be taken literally. When Christ says, "The kingdom of God is like a..." he is clearly setting forth a parable that didn't actually occur.

 

I have no disagreement that there could be misinterpretation within this text, since it's very difficult to compare a relatively young language to a very old one without having some misunderstandings in the process. However, I will point out that the first chapter gives a clear distinction of the passage of a day being defined by night becoming morning. You have to admit this can get confusing. Calling it symbolism at this point is kind of hard since the distinction made is one even we agree with today. You have a better handle on the Hebrew language than me, so I will let you fill in the blanks I've obviously left here.

 

Ah yes, I left out a part here. The phrase "there was evening and there was morning, the first day" (or second, or third), is a Hebrew idiom, a figure of speech. There are times when it says about there being the evening and morning of the day of the war- and given the war referred to, it clearly does not mean 24 hours, as the war lasted far longer than a single day.

 

As a bit of a tangent to this, I'll also ask what your take is on how old some of the people in the Bible are said to be. Living more than 900 years is pretty logic-defying. Based on what we can observe today, it seems like no warm-blooded creature is capable of living that long. Our bodies are way too fast paced. We simply aren't built that way. And to believe we had a better chance of living longer back then strikes me as a stretch of the imagination. Every day was a fight for survival for early mankind. Making it that long with so little medicinal knowledge, competition for food with other creatures/people, and other such daily obstacles just isn't realistic to me. I went back and did some math, and it seems more plausible that a year back in those days could have been a lunar cycle, or something else that they could track before we had an organized calendar system. Wondering what your thoughts are, and if this is perhaps another word that has been lost in translation that means something else.

 

As far as I am aware, the word is translated correctly. There are two explanations I have heard, that in tandem, seem to be the best explanation were one to take it literally.

 

A) We are very close to the creation point. Man's body will not decay nearly as fast from the original perfect state that it was created in as it decays today.

B) There is a verse in Genesis 1 that is exceptionally difficult to translate. It goes something like "separates the waters above the firmament from the waters that are below the firmament" - firmament being the word for sky or heaven, shamayim. Some people take this to mean that there was a canopy of water above the atmosphere that fell in when the Flood happened. This canopy would help reduce or completely negate the effects of the sun's harmful radiations.

 

The idea being that mankind is more divine than other creatures because he is created in God's image? But why can't evolution apply to man if it applies to all other creatures? We aren't so special that we don't bleed and die like all other animals on this earth. Why wouldn't it just be even more evidence of his greatness that he could mold man into his own image from a more primitive ape? It would require one to use a non-literal view once again, but there really isn't any crime in that since you're willing to accept that other parts of the Bible are poetic or symbolic in nature.

 

The idea being- what about the ape right before Adam? What is the difference between him and Adam?

 

Also, I'm not saying that I believe in evolution for other creatures of the animal kingdom, I just do not have a theological problem with it. I'm unsure what I believe there.

 

While you are correct that similarity doesn't equate to relation, from my particular stance it shows where we came from. The hands, the eyes, the general skeletal structure. Even behavior. It isn't just one feature, but so many things that lead me to see a bit of myself in the chimp or gorilla on the other side of the glass. Or perhaps that would be the other way around. "The indelible stamp of our lowly origin." But I think it's safe to say that we differ in opinion a little too much to be swayed one way or another on this point.

 

Most likely. I think there are plenty of examples of similar things that did not come from anything common. I tend to think that it shows the designer- there is one code, DNA, to all life.

 

I have to adamantly disagree with you here. There's nothing simple about evolution, adaptation, or the amount of speciation that would have to occur in such a limited time frame. I guess I would first have to ask how long ago you actually think the event occurred before going into a rant. But assuming it happened less than 10,000 years ago, the amount of macro-evolution that would have to take place just isn't possible based on what science has uncovered to this point. Add in the severe genetic deficiency of every subsequent generation of each species from all the inbreeding, and it just isn't a reasonable argument.

 

It's very possible that not every species we see today was in existence in Noah's day, but there were still too many to fit two of every species into a boat roughly 450 feet long, 45 feet high, and 75 feet wide. It just couldn't be done, especially not when he was commanded to take 7 pairs of each clean animal.

 

There is no macro-evolution that would be required to take place. Only adaptation. Macro-evolution isn't possible with billions of years, there is simply not enough time to get everything we have from a single-celled organism, that is why people like Richard Dawkins have postulated that perhaps we were seeded by alien life-forms, (he says exactly that in Expelled).

 

The flood occurred approximately 1,600 years after the creation of Adam, if I remember my chart correctly. I don't know if there is a way to nail down how long ago it occurred. I think there are quite a few examples of rapid adaptation that would show that this can occur with such speed if it is necessary- the moth during industrial age England that changed the color of its wings within a few years, for example.

 

It could easily be done. Again, you are assuming that every species was alive, when the argument is that it was only two of each kind- whatever is needed for adaptation to take place afterwards.

 

What I think is most likely is that the flood was not global, but was considered global by a people who had not yet seen just how big the world was. The Mediterranean might has well have been the edge of the world for them. It also makes the logistics of loading up a boat that size with local fauna easier to wrap my head around.

 

God promised never to destroy the world by a flood again. If it was local, why have Noah spend one hundred years building an ark? Tell him to take a hike.

 

But again, there is far more evidence that the movement of the continents was gradual, over millions of years. If this event did occur within the last 10 or even 20 thousand years, the oceans were already in place, meaning a catastrophic alteration in salinity, which would in turn kill any creature that was not designed to adapt from salty to brackish water in a short period of time. Remember, we're talking about enough fresh water to cover the tops of mountains. Many of the species we see today would be extinct.

 

No, we're not talking about that much fresh water. The mountains such as Everest were not around at this time. It would still be a lot, but not anywhere near as much as you are suggesting. Nor is it fresh water entirely- the fountains of the deeps were opened up as well as rain from the heavens.

 

Those who believe in a global flood would likely dispute the standard date for the oceans, due to the potential errors in radioactive dating that I laid out in my previous post.

 

There are few creatures that fit the description of "great fish" that could pull this off without divine guidance. At least, of the creatures that would have likely been in existence in that age. Basking sharks, sperm whales, and Great Whites are the most common candidates I have read about. Baleen whales are unlikely because they don't have the right sized esophagus to pull it off. They would choke to death. Great white shark seems unlikely because, as a rule, not many living things eaten by a great white make it to the stomach in one piece. Sperm whales are capable of pulling it off, but if I recall correctly there is no recorded incident of a man being swallowed whole, so this really can't be proven or disproven. But based on their behavior and habits, it isn't likely. I don't know the first thing about basking sharks so i won't even comment on them. Although I do know they're fucking huge.

 

The literal interpretation is indeed relevant to my original post, regarding whether or not one believed it is physically possible for a man to remain alive in the digestive system of a living creature, underwater, for 3 days. I have heard the theory that he is linked to Christ, and honestly it would make the story easier to swallow. But it's still an interpretation that has to be taken entirely on faith, in my opinion.

 

I'm not arguing that it isn't taken on faith. What I'm arguing is that there is nothing illogical about taking that on faith if you believe in an omnnipotent God.

 

I worked at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for five years, that was awesome, and learned a ton about basking sharks for some reason. Our shift supervisor was fascinated by them. I personally lean towards it being a sperm whale, but it doesn't matter for purposes of the story, which is my point.

 

For the record, after thinking about it for a while, I think I'm closer to an "agnostic atheist" line of thought than just pure atheist. Not sure if that's right, though. I don't have proof that no deity exists. I simply haven't seen the proof that one does. So I go with the default position of "seeing is believing, and burden of proof is on the theist to convince me." Not sure how that is categorized, so I'll leave it at that.

 

I agree. You cannot prove a negative. The burden of proof is not on someone to prove that God does not exist, for such a thing is impossible.