RE: Intelligence is a Curse
September 12, 2011 at 6:53 pm
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2011 at 6:59 pm by Minimalist.)
Quote:It is clear in the Bible that any who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.
It is far from clear. In fact, lots of xtians argue about that very point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation
I'm not bothering to quote from this article because it goes on forever and really says nothing of consequence. Still....xtians have been willing to kill each other about it.
(September 12, 2011 at 6:08 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I'll be here whenever you get back. I'm always here.
Hmn, 3 events, so much bullshit to choose from, let's take it from the top.
Creation, The Flood, and Exodus.
http://www.worldagesarchive.com/Referenc...ers%29.htm
Quote:Not long ago, archaeologists could agree that the Old Testament, for all its embellishments and contradictions, contained a kernel of truth. Obviously, Moses had not parted the Red Sea or turned his staff into a snake, but it seemed clear that the Israelites had started out as a nomadic band somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Mesopotamia; that they had migrated first to Palestine and then to Egypt; and that, following some sort of conflict with the authorities, they had fled into the desert under the leadership of a mysterious figure who was either a lapsed Jew or, as Freud maintained, a high-born priest of the royal sun god Aton whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup. Although much was unknown, archaeologists were confident that they had succeeded in nailing down at least these few basic facts.
That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an 'indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore
The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium B.C. but appears to be, at most, a product of the mid-first.
This is not to say that individual elements of the story are not older. But Jewish monotheism, the sole and exclusive worship of an ancient Semitic god known as Yahweh, did not fully coalesce until the period between the Assyrian conquest of the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C. and the Babylonian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah in 586.