I think it's mostly just hyperbolic rhetoric.

But obviously they were far more ignorant the past than we are, same as future peopels will see us as very ignorant.

(September 17, 2023 at 5:25 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: I think it's mostly just hyperbolic rhetoric.

But obviously they were far more ignorant the past than we are, same as future peopels will see us as very ignorant.

I know, right? I can easily imagine people in the 30th century saying, 'Those poor 21st century humans - they didn't even know how to seal their hyperdimensional rectifiers with quantum putty!'

Boru

(September 16, 2023 at 11:43 pm)Data Wrote: 2. They were as intelligent as modern man.

Writers of the Bible knew less about cosmology than an average nine-year-old child today. So the Bible claims that the Earth is flat with the dome over it while the stars are stuck to this dome and can shake loose during earthquakes and fall to Earth. It describes a world that runs on magic and has talking animals, giants, invisible spirits, and demons that can suspend the laws of nature at will and take control of living beings. The humans in it have a magic being that lives in their body.

Who said anything about Bronze Agers?

(September 17, 2023 at 7:06 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Who said anything about Bronze Agers?

No one. It’s one of those made up things that self-righteous twatwaffles like to say about atheists.

Boru

I dunno, I think I've heard the expression from people like the Amazing Atheist, Aron Ra, Hitchens, Harris, and so on online.

(September 17, 2023 at 7:50 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: I dunno, I think I've heard the expression from people like the Amazing Atheist, Aron Ra, Hitchens, Harris, and so on online.

It's used on this forum too. If you search for "herders" in the box in the upper right, you'll see lots of examples. 

Here's one:

Quote:RE: Is it possible that the universe could be eternal??... 
January 29, 2023 at 3:07 am 
Whenever believers start babbling about cosmology I just remind myself that there's bugger all in the bible about it. No surprise there. The bible's a book of faith, not a science textbook. When the new images came back from the JWST with galaxies where our current cosmological model said there shouldn't be any it wasn't the bible that explained the discrepancy. It won't be theologians who do the heavy lifting to figure this out. And the JWST wasn't launched by the church in the first place. You lot have no more interest in actual cosmology than trying to prop up the myths of some bronze age goat herders.

It took 1600 years from the time that JC got tacked up by the Romans until the point where even one of you figured out that the sun didn't go round the Earth and you promptly persecuted that poor bugger. The church's record on cosmology amounts to two millennia of knuckle-dragging ignorance and they like it that way.
5 kudos given by: Deesse23, Fireball, The Architect Of Fate, A. Secular Human, polymath257

emphasis added

Granted, writers of the Bible were not just goat herders, they were also ignorant, racist, sexist, superstitious barbarians who believed everything they couldn't explain in the world was magic.

(September 17, 2023 at 7:50 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: I dunno, I think I've heard the expression from people like the Amazing Atheist, Aron Ra, Hitchens, Harris, and so on online.

It's used on this forum too. If you search for "herders" in the box in the upper right, you'll see lots of examples. 

Here's one:

emphasis added
[/quote]

You found one, but you quoted me. Lame.