the so fallible Bible

[John V]

Mea culpa. I did carelessly contrast the issue about camels to "major claims." However, if that's the case, you cannot say that you were not told what's most important, whether the exodus story has any historical basis, i.e., the liberation, wandering, conquest.

Again, the point is that you only claimed it wasn't important after it had been refuted. Weasel weasel.

I still say under what rules does anyone think he has won a debate when he has made an inconclusive attempt to answer one out of eleven questions? You're just indulging in a lot of posturing to avoid looking like a fool. Put up or shut up.

And again, you're engaging in elephant hurling.

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Bible-believers seem to think that any loophole, however improbable, that gets the Bible off the hook has solved the problem.

Oh how I know. It seems the most common one I've seen is the "lost in translation" defense where they claim that this or that word or phrase had two definitions, but for some reason the common definition isn't the one intended, but the convoluted one which doesn't make the bible wrong or embarrassing.

For example, if someone brings up Jesus talking about slaves, I would claim "When the bible was translated, the word for 'slave' had two meanings, one being a person owned by another person, and the other meaning of 'employed worker.' So when Jesus was talking about how to treat your slaves, he was talking about how employers should treat their employees."

Of course there's never any evidence that there were two different definitions for a particular word, or why one is necessarily more correct than the other.

This is ad hoc. Atheists don't go with the most probable if it's inconvenient. Consider scurvy. The least probable outcome of a deleterious mutation is that it fixes in the species, yet that's the scenario with vitamin c synthesis in certain primates.