RE: Dear Christians: What does your god actually do?
September 25, 2015 at 2:28 pm
(This post was last modified: September 25, 2015 at 2:43 pm by Crossless2.0.)
(September 25, 2015 at 12:58 pm)Godschild Wrote:(September 24, 2015 at 9:53 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: Somehow I doubt they ate better than the Egyptians, the Chinese, the early inhabitants of the Americas, or any of the other civilizations that seem not to have noticed the worldwide flood. Why are you so wedded to this particular story? There are Christians who don't think there was literally a worldwide flood, yet they continue to believe in Christ resurrected. If you were to acknowledge that it is a myth or a legend of a particular people of a particular time and place, would that invalidate your faith or cause you to consider the Bible, as a whole, suspect?
I'm not trying to play gotcha. I mean that as a serious question.
This is what I believe, if any one thing is not true in the scriptures how am I to trust any other part. If the flood is false then how do I know that Christ isn't false. It has to be true from the beginning to the end, if any part is false then how do I determine what is real, or how could you. People who start reading the Bible and come to the conclusion that this part or that part isn't true, then they put doubt into the equation before they can find the truth through God, in other words a person stifles the Holy Spirit's conviction without being able to be lead to the truth. Why people do this is beyond me, it's like telling your math teacher he/she doesn't know what they are teaching simply because when the student first encounters the math they do not understand it so they reject it.
You know I didn't say they were eating a king's meal, what I did do, was point out it was very possible for Noah and his family and the next generation or two to easily survive and not cause any extinction of any animal before the world could recover from the flood. I did this with only three animals and some vegetation, there are more possibilities to go with what I proposed, viable ones.
GC
That being the case, and given the utter lack of evidence for a global flood as described in Genesis, why then are you still a Christian? Mind you, I'm not saying that people who don't accept a literal account of the flood story must give up their Christian faith on that basis, but you have pretty much put it in those terms for yourself.
And the math analogy is a non-starter. The student can learn the proofs necessary to understand why the teacher is correct, and it doesn't depend on accepting anything on faith but on a step-by-step process of reasoning. You've decided, on faith alone, that the flood must have happened because otherwise the "teacher", i.e., the Bible, is untrustworthy. And in the process, you've ignored the possibility that the Bible could convey "truths" through non-literal means.
*Feeling a bit odd defending the Bible to a Baptist*
Edited to add: my point about the Chinese, Egyptians, etc. (which I thought was clear enough) is that they were there precisely at the time when all of humanity except the inhabitants of the Ark were supposedly wiped out by a worldwide flood, according to a literal reading of the OT and the genealogies therein. We have compelling reasons to believe in the existence of these ancient peoples and not one shred of good evidence for a worldwide flood. Not one, despite the insane ramblings and distorted reasoning of the folks at AIG and other groups committed to salvaging a literal reading of the Bible at all costs -- the foremost costs being their rationality and simple honesty.