DNA Proves Existence of a Designer

[pocaracas]

M4X, how can you listen to god?

In the posts since this one I'm quoting, you speak of the Bible and it's prophecies, as if it represents your future listening of god.
While that book does have some moral guidelines which are valid, for all I know, it also carries many which are invalid nowadays. Because of this, I find the notion that the book was inspired by god himself a bit (alright, quite a lot) disingenuous.
The book seems to be little more than a product of its time.
As with all predictions of the future, some educated guesses do some to pass, eventually, while some never do. This same statistic is present in the Bible, so it's prophecy capability is not surprising, hence not evidence of any special insight.

All this makes me think that you are being selective when you approach that book, and, just like the driver that complains that all traffic signs are coming out red for him while missing to account for the few that are green... You too count only the prophecies that, somehow, came true (even if the earliest known texts with them are dated from after the fact), while ignoring those that have never come true.

Some time ago, I picked up a book written in the 70's and I was surprised to find in it the prediction of working from home thanks to computers and their connectivity. Before computers were a thing you could have at home, before the invention of the internet! Should I assume that Alvin Toffler was inspired by god?

Perhaps you would like to revise your stance on those prophecies, or explain why the ones that have come true are the important ones that show us unequivocally that there is divine inspiration...?

Is there any prophecy you would like me address specifically? I hope this is a fair question to you, since I don't know that I've gone into too much depth about any specific prophecy, so it would be easier for me to look the context of specific ones.  And maybe the timeline being assumed for it.  If something isn't supposed to have occurred yet, then it would be difficult to fully account for it at this point.

The trouble is... some prophecies that are in the book, kinda sorta came to pass, if you squint really hard for some, I guess.
I'm not really knowledgeable of many prophecies, but there's that big one where JC would return within the lifetime of those present... and it seems to me that, to this day, people are still waiting for that return.
And, looking into that old Priest of Zedek, the teacher of righteousness, he too was supposed to come back from the dead at some point... There's the repetition of an idea that was already hovering around...

My argument here isn't so much about particular prophecies. Like I wanted to show with that "Third Wave" book reference, it's not impossible to make educated guesses that come to pass decades later. My point is that, just like with any set of (educated) predictions, some will come to pass, and some will not.

Oracles were common at the time, exactly because they would get it right some times... and other times, they could maybe phrase things in such a broad way that almost anything could be made to fit. To this day, fortune tellers thrive on this sort of effect... but do you consider that these people have some divine connection? If not, why? Their success rate is probably very close to the bible prophecies' success rate.

When you say "product of its time, I would have to agree in part, but not in full.  Of course it was written in consideration of the era, but truth is also truth regardless of time.  "Thou shalt not murder" would be equally relevant today as it would have been thousands of years ago.  The laws were also condensed in explanation, when Jesus said the greatest law was, paraphrased, loving God with all of ourselves, and the second greatest was loving our neighbor as ourselves.  Personally, I would agree those ring equally true for today.  But we also had things that were effective in a certain point in history, and wouldn't apply directly today.  Like when God told David not to do the census, but he did it anyway.  That doesn't mean we can't do a census, because is understood in the context of its time.

And what about when it says "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"?

What's that?




But look how well the Muslims picked up on that notion!



About that "loving God with all of ourselves", I guess it comes with what you said about listening to god. No matter how much I listen, I can't hear any god. Can you tell me if you can hear anything? And how? That's how I started my previous post to you. That's something I can't get over.
If there's no way to hear god, then what are people loving?
My answer to this is, of course, people are loving a character in a book. Like many people love Tyrion or Jamie Lannister, or Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, or James Bond. If a person can Willingly Suspend Disbelief, I'm certain that it is possible for this mental mechanism to go haywire and this suspension then becomes permanent. I think this is sort of what happens when children become indoctrinated, or when adults who were never exposed to much of religion, suddenly go searching for it and become awestruck with it.
People suspend disbelief to the point of actual belief.