RE: To Christians who aren't creationists
May 7, 2012 at 4:36 pm
(This post was last modified: May 7, 2012 at 4:38 pm by Tea Earl Grey Hot.)
@Ryft, I'll try to follow up on your points you directed at me a few days ago eventually. I don't have a lot of time to be writing long replies this week because I'm doing finals.
But on this genealogy subject, there's a very convincing naturalistic explanation I learned about recently. Basically if I remember correctly, you can find genealogies from other ancient middle-eastern religions that assign extremely long life spans for past rulers. Usually in the range of thousands of years. And these genealogies all start with longer life spans in the past and gradually shrink to the point that you get to average life spans by the time the text was written. Of course, Christians may say that the life spans in the Bible are more realistic being only in hundreds of years instead of thousands like other religions. But there's an explanation for that too. In the Babylonian religion (I think it was Babylonian, if I remember correctly) their word for "year" happens to be very similar to the Hebrew word for "Sabbath." The theory is that Hebrew scribes, when coming up with a timeline for their religious figures, added up all the ages from the Babylonian timeline, but thinking it was in "sabbaths" (or weeks I guess you would say) they came up with a drastically reduced timeline in years. They then divided up the newer shorter time for their own religious figures resulting in the 900 year long life spans that you see in the start of the timeline. And just like the pagan timelines they imitated, the spans gradually decrease.
I heard all of this on Robert M Price's "The Bible Geek" podcast and that's what I understood of it. Perhaps someone here is better aquatinted with the theory and could direct us to some written material on the matter.
But on this genealogy subject, there's a very convincing naturalistic explanation I learned about recently. Basically if I remember correctly, you can find genealogies from other ancient middle-eastern religions that assign extremely long life spans for past rulers. Usually in the range of thousands of years. And these genealogies all start with longer life spans in the past and gradually shrink to the point that you get to average life spans by the time the text was written. Of course, Christians may say that the life spans in the Bible are more realistic being only in hundreds of years instead of thousands like other religions. But there's an explanation for that too. In the Babylonian religion (I think it was Babylonian, if I remember correctly) their word for "year" happens to be very similar to the Hebrew word for "Sabbath." The theory is that Hebrew scribes, when coming up with a timeline for their religious figures, added up all the ages from the Babylonian timeline, but thinking it was in "sabbaths" (or weeks I guess you would say) they came up with a drastically reduced timeline in years. They then divided up the newer shorter time for their own religious figures resulting in the 900 year long life spans that you see in the start of the timeline. And just like the pagan timelines they imitated, the spans gradually decrease.
I heard all of this on Robert M Price's "The Bible Geek" podcast and that's what I understood of it. Perhaps someone here is better aquatinted with the theory and could direct us to some written material on the matter.
My ignore list
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
