The Holy Bible - fact or fiction?

[Brian37]

Jörmungandr ....
If the Bible says something happened and it actually did, you still don't believe that the flood happened?

There is a vast gap between the bible saying something happened and knowing that it actually happened.  We have no evidence that a worldwide flood occurred, and the bible claiming that it did is of no consequence.  There is plenty of literature, holy and secular, from ages past that claim all sorts of things.  That something "says" that something happened, particularly from this time period, is no guarantee that it did occur.

Since it did, read the Bible section about the flood that God told Noah  years before  it occurred.

We have no evidence that either event happened.  Do we know that God told Noah of the flood before it occurred?  This is all written in the past tense.  I could write a book today saying that I predicted World War II.  That would be no example of prophecy as there's no evidence that I knew about the event before it occurred.  Likewise we have no real evidence that Noah knew of the impending flood before it happened.  It's all written from the perspective of events that had already happened.  What we do know is that the books of the old testament were finalized sometime between 1200 BCE and the common era, and that the new testament was written between the first and second centuries of the common era.  For an example from the bible to be valid prophecy, the event would have to occur between the writing of it in the bible, and the present day.  The book of Daniel is instructive in this regard.  It claims to have been written during the Babylonian captivity, which would make its foretelling of certain events a valid example of prophecy.  However, the oldest copy of the book of Daniel that we have dates to about 150 BCE, post-dating the events foretold.  On the basis of this, it's impossible to determine whether Daniel is valid prophecy or not.  Internal evidence from the book suggest that rather than predating events as the book claims, it was actually written about the same time as the events which it is "foretelling." Unlike the valid question of the prophetic nature of Daniel, the tale of Noah is told from the perspective of an author writing long after the events that are claimed to have occurred.

There is an additional difficulty in the tale of Noah in the question of where did the author of Genesis get his information regarding what God told Noah beforehand?  Tradition ascribes authorship of Genesis to Moses.  So Moses either got his information from God, or from oral history.  Neither source is specified in the text, so it's impossible to say with any surety that the tale as told is reliable.  Supposedly, God can tell no lie.  However, oral tradition is another matter.  It's anybody's guess whether the tale as recorded actually occurred in the manner that it is told in Genesis.

It isn't just that there is no evidence that a flood happened. I agree it did not. But it is also that science contradicts the claim on top of that. There is no way that flood could have happened as believers would claim. Science has damned good data now on the real geological history and astrophysics of earth in it's 4 billion years. The bible was not written with the intent of scientific objectivity, no religion of antiquity for that matter knew  what science knows now.

It is an immoral story alone, much less the science. It is not a corrective action, it is an act of revenge and genocide. Just as a moral motif I'd call the story vile. But even at the end of the story, DNA would say in the case of a limited gene pool someone would have to be fucking a family member eventually. 

Christians, and Muslims and Jews and even in polytheism back then prior to those three, were making very bad guesses as to the god/spirit/divine world interacting with humans. Floods are local, some bigger than others, and people in antiquity didn't know what our atmosphere was or how we have a working knowledge of it now, so a local rain back then to even polytheists could seem like the entire world because they didn't understand that the planet was a globe, so the horizon, especially if viewed at sea level or ground level, if flooded would seem like the entire world.


The Epic Of Gilgamesh is a polytheistic flood story and older.

---

The other absurdity of that story is the horrible claim that all the species of the world on 7 continents magically crossed the ocean, exactly how? How did the Australian kangaroo get across the ocean? If the world was flooded, why didn't the salt water kill off all the fresh water aquatic life? How exactly would Noah have handled dangerous animals like Cobras and dart frogs? And "poof" is all the theist has a solution? And why do the different books disagree on the numbers of animals? Some say two of each, other versions say 7. And again, if one family is left over, who are they fucking to repopulate the planet if not each other?

"poof" doesn't cut it. Maybe the book was written like that for the same reason polytheists made up gods like Horus and Apollo and Thor. Maybe that book was horribly written like that because humans didn't have our modern knowledge.

---

Like I said before "If you look around and see so many complex living beings, and you still need proof that it was designed by a Supreme Being?" and that isn't proof enough,  and if your idea of "If i can't see it or touch it i don't believe it exists", I can't help ya out.

As for the "Evolution is the science that explains how life evolved." , that still says basically something appeared from nowhere and eventually turned into all the stuff we can see.
If you think that is true, and not a Creator we call God making everything from nothing, I can't help you out either.

The Bible is the only truthful book you will ever read.
It tells everything for Creation to the end of time.If you read it front to back and dismiss all or part of it, I can't help ya with that.
At the end of time, when you wake up you will find out The Bible was 100% correct in all it's verses.
I just hope some of you might see the light before then.

Evolution DOES NOT claim life came out of nothing. Atoms have mass, atoms make up carbon base life. Atoms are very real and demonstrably and repeatedly proven by science to exist.

Yes, all life is related and? You have no concept of very slow changes over long periods of time. Funny how you can call a Great Dane a dog, call a pit bull a dog. Funny how you can call a domestic house cat and big cats like tigers and lions both "cats'. We are related to other primates just like you can accept that grass and bushes and trees are considered plants.

Evolution does not claim that a monkey gave direct birth to a human. It does say our older cousins had offspring, slightly different look, then more splits and more families with slightly different looks because of time in that so many generations happened and so many different slight splits happened we look vastly different, just like a house cat looks different than a tiger and both are still called cats.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has pointed out that people who dont understand evolution think of it as like "mixing paint", no, with the base pares of DNA you need to think about it like "shuffling a deck of cards". The uniform back of the deck is in evolution, the 99% DNA all life shares, and the face cards are the 1% which makes each card look slightly different, like the Jack and Queen of hearts look slightly different, but the two of hearts and 3 of spades looks completely different. 

Most people don't know, or ignore, like you for example, that whales have hip bones, fossil records prove that they started out in water, went to land, then back to water. No sudden change, no, but adaptation and tiny genetic changes between generations. 

DNA is in everything. It is in bacteria, cockroaches, grass, and trees and humans. All life is made up of adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine=DNA.  DNA is the back of the uniform card, and the slight genetic shuffle that prevents slightly different looks which we observe as the face of the card. And all evolution needs is reproduction, adaptation, and very slight change in the sequence over long periods of time to create slightly different looks, and over time those slight difference can shuffle more and more over time over millions of years to create completely different looks.