(April 25, 2013 at 8:20 am)Consilius Wrote: People in the Bible are weird. The thing is that we interpret the Bible based on the culture of our Western democratic society. You'd be surprised how a lot of the crazy stuff that goes on in the Old Testament can be justified by basically good morals found in ancient Hebrew culture.
On the contrary; people in the Bible are typical for their time. That is to say, there wasn't anything that set them apart from anyone else, which is inconsistent with following the rules and laws of a perfect and morally just being. The same deity who thrashed the Egyptians about like a rag doll and dropped the Red Sea on an entire army suddenly found that his almighty hands were tied when it came to managing the behavior of his chosen people. I mean, you'd think that a law saying "slavery is wrong" would be easy to introduce to a people who knew the pain of slavery all too well!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
