RE: One of Jehovah's Witnesses needs your help
April 26, 2015 at 11:46 pm
(This post was last modified: April 26, 2015 at 11:48 pm by nihilistcat.)
(April 26, 2015 at 10:11 pm)nicanica123 Wrote: Hello, I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses. I have started a couple of threads already but I want help with one subject in particular...
The bibles lack of credibility.
I have heard many charges against the bibles lack of credibility. Such as, it is a collection of fairy tales, it is historically inaccurate, it borrowed from surrounding religious lore, etc.
Please understand that I am agnostic. I do not know what I believe but I am making an absolute stance on what I believe until I hash out some things. So please, give me links, facts, or whatever else you have to help me with this one subject. Being told, "you know that its a bunch of bullshit, right?" is not any of those things. It may be true but I want to see facts. I don't want to hear about specific JW misgivings, just the bible as a whole. Why we can know for certainty that it is absolutely not the word of a divine being. If you say something that I feel deserves a rebuttal, take it as my lifelong indoctrination or whatever else you want but I promise that I am looking at this from a skeptical viewpoint. I want to clear my mind of the doubt that lingers in my head. I would almost say that I am 70 or 80 percent atheist at the moment. So my 20 to 30 percent may argue. Thanks for your help! I look forward to hearing your thoughts
I think one of the best pieces of evidence to emerge somewhat recently, is the archaeology concerning the Exodus from Egypt. The consensus among most archaeologists is that the Exodus never happened.
In archaeology, scientists attempt to verify historical records by digging for the evidence. They dig through strata, and they're able to determine a date range within a very narrow range. An event like several million people traveling through a desert over the course of 40 years, would leave very distinct and definitive types of evidence (e.g. DNA evidence in the region of strata corresponding to the dates found in the historical record). After the better part of a century excavating the Sinai desert, no evidence of this alleged event has been found, leading the majority of archaeologists to conclude that the Exodus is not historical, but rather, mythological.
Obviously evolutionary science debunks the Genesis narrative quite thoroughly (although the usual response is to view Genesis as figurative rather than literal). And then there's the odd fact of a god who endowed humanity with numerous different religions, provoking centuries of infighting, and leaving us with no empirical evidence, no way to discern which is right and which is wrong (besides the obscure concept of faith), and the very obvious reasons why people believe as they do (the region and culture they were born into is usually the deciding factor). Can a god delineate good from evil using such seemingly arbitrary factors like birthplace? Apparently, our gods did exactly that.
Or the more logical explanation ... we found agency in an inhospitable environment because we're a pattern seeking species who sought an explanation for natural events in a prescientific era, when good explanations were lacking. So we supplanted truth with the very unreliable conclusions drawn from our pattern seeking intuition, because at the time, that's all we had (and it gave us comfort, it soothed our grieving, and gave us some sense of metaphysical purpose).
