(October 13, 2013 at 4:04 pm)xpastor Wrote: I am not questioning the scholarly credentials of Scarre or Bulliet.

That reply wasn't to you, it was to Minnie, who charged that my sources were Christian apologists.

Quote:You are going on and on about the camels,

So are you. It takes two to tango you know.

Quote:which suggests to me that you lack any response to the many other substantive issues covered in The Bible Unearthed:

True - I'm not going to look into every charge when they get the first one so wrong. You really should lead from strength.

Scarre sounds like a bullshit artist to me.

Quote:Scarre studied at the University of Cambridge. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA), that was later promoted to Master of Arts (MA). He then undertook graduate study of landscape change and archaeological sites in western France, accumulating in a Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD).[1]

Wow...a ph. d. in fucking philosophy! So impressive.

(October 13, 2013 at 4:32 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Wow...a ph. d. in fucking philosophy! So impressive.

All PhD's are 'doctors of philosophy'...

Getting a PhD is different to getting a Philosophy doctorate...His PhD was in Archeology, like my fiancé's is in microbiology, and mine is in political science.

Blind people or those in denial can still be highly educated. My old pastor had a doctorate in divinity

(October 14, 2013 at 8:03 pm)Searching4truth Wrote: Blind people or those in denial can still be highly educated. My old pastor had a doctorate in divinity

But I believe Mini's and my point is that the subject of one's PHD study is relevant to it's value. A PHD in divinity, is akin to a PHD in bullshitology, with just a touch of "divine" stupidity. Philosophy is only marginally better.

Just because someone spends a lifetime refining a web of nonsense does not make them educated, only extensively brainwashed or very slow.

There is NO TRUE religious bible from ancient times.

One must remember is that the bible was Started by a group of superstitious nomads who were basically goat herders and cave dwellers and is CLEARLY based on the Visual interpretations and myths of the time it was originally written. Much of the bible is an extension of the tribes of Israel trying to justify themselves by extending their existence BACK to the "beginning" through fairy tales that we know never happened today.

The problem is that visual interpretations are often wrong. A person who has driven in Texas could drive for miles looking ahead at the flat land - and assume the world is flat - but it isn't in reality. And that becomes a problem for the bible - where in Mark and Luke - there is a story of the christ being taken - by the Devil - up to a high mountain - from which he could see ALL the kingdoms of the earth.

Yet - based on the curvature of the earth - even if that mountain was Mount Everest - the most that could have been seen would be about 216 miles - so he could not have seen even all the kingdoms mentioned in the bible before that supposed time.

Of course - at the time of the christ - a Family Blood Line ONLY went through the father because then they thought that a man Planted a SEED into the woman that contained everything for the progeny to grow - they did know that the child and the mothers blood did not mix by that time.
So - a woman was NOT a blood relation to her children. ANd of course - that also becomes a problem for the religion since the bible also states that the Messiah will be a descendant of David - but a "person" without a human father had NO such blood line - and a foster father doesn't count.

OK, in response to my last question about the historical reliability of the Bible there was some quibbling about camels, but no one attempted to respond to the major claims, that the central narrative of the Old Testament never happened, there was no liberation from Egypt, no wandering in the desert, no conquest of Canaan. So I will move on to my next question.

Q: Is the Bible free from internal contradictions?

A:

Unfortunately for the inerrantists the Bible has a number of parallel accounts of the same event (often a fictional event) and there are divergences in the details.

The story is told twice in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 about a census of the fighting men of Israel ordered by David.

In Samuel God is angry at Israel for unspecified reasons and he inspires David to conduct a census for which God will then punish the nation. In Chronicles it is Satan who incites David to take a census, and God subsequently becomes angry.

The results of the census are a bit different. Samuel pegs the total at 1,300,000 for both Israel and Judah. Chronicles says it was 1,100,000 with a note that the tribes of Levi and Benjamin were not counted. In any case, the figures are grossly inflated as we saw that David's "kingdom" likely had 45,000 inhabitants in total.

In both versions God is angry about the census (for reasons intelligible only to a Canaanite deity) and through the prophet Gad offers David his choice of three punishments: three years of famine, three months of being defeated on the battlefield or three days of deadly plague. David leaves the choice up to God, who gives them the last alternative, a plague killing 70,000 Israelites. As the plague reaches its limit, David is commanded to buy the threshing floor of Araunah and offer sacrifices there.

One last difference: In Samuel he pays 50 shekels of silver; in Chronicles it is a much more generous 600 shekels of gold.

These discrepancies would be no big deal in considering two different secular works, but in a collection supposedly inspired by an omniscient deity we can reasonably expect that he will not be absent-minded about what he said a few hundred pages back.

There are much bigger differences in the two accounts of the birth of Jesus, but we are so accustomed to the blended version presented in Christmas pageants that we will not notice if we are not looking for them.

Both Matthew and Luke are dealing with the same issue. Jesus was known to come from Nazareth, but if he truly was the messiah, then prophecy demanded that he should be born at Bethlehem. They solved it in very different ways with incompatible details.

In Matthew Joseph and Mary appear to be living in Bethlehem. Nothing is said about any journey, certainly no stable. Joseph "took Mary home as his wife" but did not consummate the marriage until after her son was born. The magi come to King Herod seeking the newborn King of the Jews, and Herod's priests say that the messiah is to be born in Bethlehem. So the magi arrive with their gifts (no shepherds in Matthew) but are warned in a dream not to go back to Herod with the location of the baby. Joseph has another dream warning him to take the child and his mother to Egypt. It finally sinks in on Herod that the magi are not coming back, and he orders the death of all male children two years and under in Bethlehem. (It never happened. Flavius Josephus detested Herod, and in his History of the Jewish People set down a long catalog of his crimes but never mentioned the slaughter of the innocents.) In Egypt eventually Joseph is told in a dream that it is safe to come home. Learning that Herod's son Archelaus is ruling in Judea he decides that it will be safest to settle in the remote region of Galilee, so "he went and lived in a town called Nazareth." Which sounds as if he had never been there before. In any case the time between Jesus' birth and the trip to Nazareth is at least several months to travel to Egypt and back, and possibly more than two years.

Luke uses a very different mechanism to reconcile the Nazarene home of Jesus with a birth in Bethlehem. Joseph and Mary live in Nazareth, but in obedience to the call for a census throughout the Roman world they travel to Bethlehem, because that is the home of Joseph's ancestors. As noted in an earlier post, there is no record of such an empire-wide census, and the Romans would never have imposed the awkward requirement of traveling to an ancestral home to register. As we all know from those Christmas pageants, there was no room at the inn, so Mary gave birth in a stable, and shepherds came to worship the baby Jesus lying in a manger.

There is a big time discrepancy which simply cannot be harmonized. As noted above, in Matthew it takes months or even years for Mary and Joseph to get from Bethlehem to Nazareth. Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph go to Jerusalem (a short trip) to perform "the purification rites required by the Law of Moses" and then when they "had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth." That would be a span of only 41 days. According to Leviticus 12 Jesus would have been presented for circumcision on his eighth day, and then Mary would wait a further 33 days for her purification before offering a sacrifice.

It's like shooting fish in a barrel to come up with contradictions between widely separated parts of the Bible, but I can't resist taking one pot shot since it deals with the central doctrine of Christianity.

As is well known, Paul came up with the doctrine of justification, that all humans deserved death because of Adam's sin but were offered salvation for free because of Christ's sacrificial death on the cross.

Quote:18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. (Romans 5)

However, Ezekiel goes to great pains to assert the opposite in Chapter 18. We will each of us be judged on the basis of our own actions.

Quote:20 The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them. 21 “But if a wicked person turns away from all the sins they have committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, that person will surely live; they will not die. 22 None of the offenses they have committed will be remembered against them. Because of the righteous things they have done, they will live. 23 Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? 24 “But if a righteous person turns from their righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked person does, will they live? None of the righteous things that person has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness they are guilty of and because of the sins they have committed, they will die.

Quote:Jesus was known to come from Nazareth, but if he truly was the messiah, then prophecy demanded that he should be born at Bethlehem.

Not really. The Bethlehem bullshit of Micah 5 is exhibit A for xtian cherry-picking of OT texts.

Quote:Micah 5

New International Version (NIV)
A Promised Ruler From Bethlehem

5 [a]Marshal your troops now, city of troops,
for a siege is laid against us.
They will strike Israel’s ruler
on the cheek with a rod.

2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times.”

3 Therefore Israel will be abandoned
until the time when she who is in labor bears a son,
and the rest of his brothers return
to join the Israelites.

4 He will stand and shepherd his flock
in the strength of the Lord,
in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they will live securely, for then his greatness
will reach to the ends of the earth.

5 And he will be our peace
when the Assyrians invade our land
and march through our fortresses.
We will raise against them seven shepherds,
even eight commanders,
6 who will rule[c] the land of Assyria with the sword,
the land of Nimrod with drawn sword.[d]
He will deliver us from the Assyrians
when they invade our land
and march across our borders.

Two problems here.

One, the promised leader is supposed to defeat the Assyrians, an attack which came in the late 8th century BC and Two, Assyria kicked the living shit out of Israel and wiped it off the face of the earth.

Not a very good performance from someone who was chosen by "god" huh?

Leave it to xtians to see "a leader from Bethlehem!!!!! Yep, there's JAYSUS!!!"

Silly fucks.

Of course, a third charge could be laid as well. Jesus never "ruled" over shit. Even in their own story he is executed like the lowest slave.

(October 15, 2013 at 11:02 am)xpastor Wrote: OK, in response to my last question about the historical reliability of the Bible there was some quibbling about camels, but no one attempted to respond to the major claims, that the central narrative of the Old Testament never happened, there was no liberation from Egypt, no wandering in the desert, no conquest of Canaan. So I will move on to my next question.

You mean that in response to your elephant hurling, your first claim was shown to be incorrect.

Quote:Q: Is the Bible free from internal contradictions?

A:

Can you define contradiction as you're using it here? On another site, your definition became so watered-down that it wasn't troublesome for the Bible to have such contradictions.

Quote:Unfortunately for the inerrantists the Bible has a number of parallel accounts of the same event (often a fictional event) and there are divergences in the details.

The story is told twice in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 about a census of the fighting men of Israel ordered by David.

Remember, you probably won't get responses to elephant hurling, so is this the contradiction you want to lead with?

I'm more interested in why your fucking god killed 70,000 people because some asshole fucked up a census? What was he doing? Getting rid of the overage?

Another question, of course, and probably more important is why you would find such a murderous motherfucker worthy of worship? That seems like more of a problem with you than any fucking god, though.