(May 8, 2022 at 9:31 am)Green Diogenes Wrote:(May 8, 2022 at 8:07 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Are you aware that the authors of the papers that claim cited have roundly debunked that claim and repeatedly asked for a correction or retraction?
Outside of that, do you notice how you begin with the suggestion that magic book need not be literal - but default to psuedo-literalism anyway, as a conclusion, in the insistence that the story (and others, apparently) recount a historic event?
Now..wholly within the context of just your own conclusion, and needing nothing other than your own critical thinking skills. What sort of thing do you think would vaporize another human being circa 1500bce..within visual range of a witness, but leave that witness alive to tell the tale?
I do like your approach though. Reading it with empathy, trying to feel for the human beings involved. The trouble is that you're doing so in an implicitly literalist context. What would you feel if you were a character in the story. The authors, are not the characters. It's the predispositions and messages of the authors that explain the narrative contents. It's not a report from any front about a real event. It continues on in this fashion to the very end. With rebels, revisionists, polemicists, and pundits contextualizing their own life's experience, in their own time, through stories of an imagined past and characters familiar to their intended audiences. In a word, mythbuilding.
I was aware that the site was claimed to be roundly debunked, but I never saw anything other than sophistic arguments based on mockery of religion, and using individual scientist's misinterpretations to rubbish their whole dataset, in the same way YECs rubbish everything from NASA just because of fish eye lenses in launch vehicles.
Yes, I am completely aware of these different schools of thought. I'm trying to break apart the false dichotomy between them. The entire main point of my first post in this thread is that people are locked into a 'literal' reading which is just religious myths inserted on top of the Bible, and the text itself doesn't support that view. This effectively locks a huge area of study into the realm of "anti-science nonsense" which is avoided by anyone who wants to keep hold of a career, unless they want to go into the other lucrative business of pushing Anti-science nonsense, who are not concerned with truth.
What do you mean by wholly within the context of just my own conclusion?
That is generally how you can understand religious stories, which have a lot of well documented patterns and a flexible relation to reality, yes. Understanding this is how you understand how specific "Bible Stories" and their surrounding cultural literature have been derived from a book which doesn't contain those stories.
BINGO! Your words, "That is generally how you can understand religious stories." <----- Stop right there, nothing to be said after. "Generally" yes, people like what they want to believe. That is what you are really saying, because you have nothing. "Just believe me because I like it."
"well documented patterns" < Again your words.
Yes, there are well documented patterns humans develop that are completely false. The ancient Egyptians are documented as to believing in Horus, Osiris, Ra and Isis, but 3 thousand years of belief didn't make those gods real. Humans like following religion, and?
It is your own conclusion. No religion in human history is universal. Saying that words were written down only means they were written, but don't claim their is a "correct" way of interpreting those stories. Ask a million believers what they think the correct interpretation of a holy writing is, and you will get a million different answers.
Think about all the reasons you rightfully reject all the other gods you don't buy into, and apply that scrutiny to your own biases.
Theists of countless religions use words and phrases like "the moral of the story is", "culture", "history" and "interpretation". And in reality all that does is allow them falsely claim to be the patent holder of morality, and even the seat of scientific discovery.
When the scientific world gains a vast majority consensus, they don't have to use words like "version", instead they use the words "method" and "model" and ethical scientists leave their religion out of the lab, if they have a religion at all. There is no overlap between science and religion, there is only the human false perception that religion and a god or gods handed human curiosity down to our species from above.
And saying a story of empathy and compassion in a holy writing makes the supernatural real is narcissistic and absurd. Superman always saves Lois Lane, and isn't that a nice story? I like morality of the Yoda character, but I accept he is just that. God/god/gods are all mere human projections of our species desire to have control over our environments and a placebo to avoid facing our finite existence.
