(October 2, 2013 at 12:40 am)cato123 Wrote: Lion IRC, if you have actually read Leviticus 14 and claim this then you are a fucking idiot. How else to you reconcile LV 14-8 'the person to be cleansed'?
That is a "ceremonial cleansing" that occurs only after the person has been healed (verse 3). The wording is confusing throughout, and you are left to wonder why they were ordered to go through such a complicated ritual once the person had been cured of the disease. I mean, it's a lot more than just a couple of pigeons and some props; they have to slaughter a lamb and smear a bit of blood here and there. There's even a separate paragraph-and-a-half for what to do if the person in question can't afford a regulation cleansing, which is even more bizarre. It's just right neighborly of god to have a backup plan in case you're poor. I wonder if there was a second priest standing outside the temple with a sign reading "GHETTO CLEANSINGS HERE."
"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
