Christians. Could you be wrong?

[Mister Agenda]

A preliminary question: How is an absence of information considered the same as a contradiction?{/quote]

It would only be a contradiction if there should be information where you're looking. For example, if you claimed the moon was split in two last night, and we can find no evidence of it, that's a contradiction, because if the moon split in two last night, there should certainly be evidence of it.

[quote='Undeceived' pid='730748' dateline='1408093484']
Yet there are plenty of flood stories, from various civilizations, as you can easily find on wikipedia.

Some cultures have local flood stories, some have global flood stories, and some don't have any. It doesn't take a global flood to explain the origin of the stories, a local one will do, or observing fossil seashells on mountain tops could reasonably cause one to speculate that the ocean was once as high as the mountaintops. Primitive people can be excused for not understanding the problems with that or that the real explanation is that the mountaintops were once so low.

I can't think of an example of a tribe localized to to volcanic mountains that has a global flood story.

Did you know that the ancient Chinese symbol for 'boat' is composed of the characters “vessel” “eight” and “people”?

I've heard that. My family is mostly Pentecostal. I've never heard it from anyone I would consider an expert on Chinese.

I'm curious: are you not going to address Esquilax's point about the verse in Isaiah that refers to the 'circle of the earth' not being evidence that the writer was aware the earth is closer in shape to a ball than a disk?

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Hm. The characters Undeceived refers to are modern, simplified Hanzi characters. I wonder why they didn't use the ancient characters? Why use characters that have had centuries to be modified since Christians made contact with China when there are characters thousands of years old scratched on ancient artifacts?

And of course there's the problem of pareidolia...with tens of thousands of characters to consider, if you go looking for patterns, there will be a large number of them, purely by chance.

I've seen people do the same thing with English, with the claim that the English word 'good' is based on the word 'God'. It isn't, despite the spelling difference only being one letter. It actually derives from a Protogermanic world (something like gothez) that means roughly the same thing as 'good' does now. 'God' comes from the Protogermanic word 'guthan' ('to invoke', or maybe 'to pour').

It's easy to mistake similarities for actual connections when you only have a superficial understanding of the subject. I completely bought the 'good' comes from 'God' meme for years, until I finally bothered to research it.