I believe the Bible is God's Word

[Mister Agenda]

I mean, that's not what it was at all, but I don't like the Bible either.

Yeah, it was not written by Bronze Age goat herders or compiled in the Dark Ages.

I've found that a lot of atheists don't use terms like this literally. They are comfortable, in their own language, speaking in metaphor or allegory.

It's okay to do that as long as you don't insist that it's NOT metaphor or allegory.

[The Valkyrie]

I mean, that's not what it was at all, but I don't like the Bible either.

Yeah, it was not written by Bronze Age goat herders or compiled in the Dark Ages.

I've found that a lot of atheists don't use terms like this literally. They are comfortable, in their own language, speaking in metaphor or allegory.

You're right.

It's based upon myths by Bronze Age goat herders which were eventually compiled into written form by Bronze Age priests.

Later, many myths were created around a semi-mythical man-god named Yeshua, which were then compiled into the bible by a group of men who decided which myths will be included and which won't.

Then it has been re-written and re-translated hundreds of times.

[Belacqua]

Yeah, it was not written by Bronze Age goat herders or compiled in the Dark Ages.

I've found that a lot of atheists don't use terms like this literally. They are comfortable, in their own language, speaking in metaphor or allegory.

It's okay to do that as long as you don't insist that it's NOT metaphor or allegory.

Absolutely! 

Some of the best, most important writing in history has been in non-literal forms. Philosophy, literature, all kinds of wisdom literature have different tools at their disposal. Especially in pre-modern writing, but today also.

It's a shame and a dumbing-down when people take these things literally.

So if someone wanted to use "Bronze Age sheepherder" as a kind of historically inaccurate insult, that wouldn't be strange. It's like calling Trump voters Neanderthals*. But some less informed people might read it and think it's literally true. 


*I am aware that modern humans may retain some Neanderthal DNA, but I've never heard that it's enough to affect political affiliation.

[Nay_Sayer]

It's okay to do that as long as you don't insist that it's NOT metaphor or allegory.

Absolutely! 

Some of the best, most important writing in history has been in non-literal forms. Philosophy, literature, all kinds of wisdom literature have different tools at their disposal. Especially in pre-modern writing, but today also.

It's a shame and a dumbing-down when people take these things literally.

So if someone wanted to use "Bronze Age sheepherder" as a kind of historically inaccurate insult, that wouldn't be strange. It's like calling Trump voters Neanderthals*. But some less informed people might read it and think it's literally true. 


*I am aware that modern humans may retain some Neanderthal DNA, but I've never heard that it's enough to affect political affiliation.

I would never call trump voters Neanderthals, It would be an huge insult to the Neanderthals.

[Belacqua]

It's based upon myths by Bronze Age goat herders

Some stories in the Old Testament no doubt existed for a long time, in various forms, before they were written down. Possibly in the Bronze Age. It's difficult to determine exactly.

It's especially difficult to know who made them up originally. There were goat herders in those days. There were also educated classes who knew a lot more than goat herders, and were writing with various purposes in mind.

If you have some historical evidence showing that goat herders were responsible, that would be interesting to see. 

 which were eventually compiled into written form by Bronze Age priests.

The Bronze Age is said to have ended in about 1200 BC. Recent scholarship dates the oldest parts of the Old Testament to the 6th century BC. So that's a few centuries different. 

But as I say, to make a more effective insult you can say whatever non-literal thing you want. Say it was written by the first amphibian to emerge from the slime, if you want.

[Paleophyte]

Which god?

And which Bible?

Oh, never mind. Says it was written by a bunch of King Jimmy's buddies right here inside the front cover.

[Paleophyte]

For millennia, the first two verses of Genesis were thought to be only poetic.

And recently it's been shown that all of the other verses are as well.

However, they have been shown to be scientific in recent years.

Nope. That's called cherry picking the data. Kindly observe:

Verse 1 - The Universe has been determined to have a beginning (Ref: the space-time theorems) as shown conclusively by authors George Ellis, Roger Penrose, and Steven Hawking in the early 70’s that the 4 dimensions can be traced back to a point of singularity (one dimension).

Pretty hilarious that you use the term "conclusively" there when there's been no conclusion about the origin of the universe or even if there was an origin. What the scientists that you're misrepresenting here have actually stated is that if you extrapolate the laws of physics backward you arrive at wrong answers like singularities. Singularities are the divide by zero errors of physics and they demonstrate that something is dreadfully wrong with your model. We know that the models are wrong because when we extrapolate them backward, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics give different wrong answers.

Genesis 1: 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. *
*Ancient Earth may have been a "water world" without any dry land

So is the Earth formless and empty or is it covered in waters? Please make up your mind. Also, is the "Spirit of God" actually a stork that wandered out of a plagiarized Egyptian creation myth?

But let's not get stuck on theological details like trying to make sense of those ramblings. How does any of that have anything to do with a speculative pop-sci article on the conditions on Earth some 3.24 billion years ago? You might want to note that the world had been around for over a billion years at that point and that the "waters" had a run-in with planetary accretion and the Rhea impactor a bit earlier in the story. At the energies produced when planetesimals collide, you're no longer dealing with anything that can properly be described as "waters" since it won't even have intact molecules. And you definitely won't be hovering over whatever exotic high-energy matter it becomes. Well, not for very long at any rate.

Oh, and the universe had been hanging out for a bit over 10 billion years by that point. You'll need to revise that scripture to read:

"And the Lord moved over the primordial quark-gluon plasma
And was instantly incinerated and photodisintegrated
And Lo! then did cosmic inflation remove all trace of His Dumb Ash
Except for the faintest lingering echo of "Fuuuuuuuuuuck!" imprinted in the Cosmic Microwave Background."

[snowtracks]

Hawking wrote this about the provenance of the universe in book: A Brief History of Time
"Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed before it ever reached its present size." *

---------------------------
*
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/Faithpathh/hawking.html

[Fake Messiah]

It's especially difficult to know who made them up originally. There were goat herders in those days. There were also educated classes who knew a lot more than goat herders, and were writing with various purposes in mind.

There are educated people now and they are not the ones claiming to speak to god and write holy books, but the dumbest people are doing that - just like it has always been the case. It's not especially difficult to know that, just read the text because it's very stupid, like guy gets swallowed by a sea monster that spits him out in three days, or the talking snake, or the world flood, etc.

[zebo-the-fat]

If the bible is gods word, why are they all made on a printing press? God can make a universe but needs humans to make his book?