A Former Atheist

[Esquilax]

How could the Bible have corrected its reporting of the human interaction of slavery?

So you're telling me that an all powerful, universe creating god cannot correct the bible? That's beyond his power? Or are you just being obtuse?

You are not very well informed of the meaning of the Bible because you see it as a moral compass.

A view that the bible itself confirms, given all its talk about this and that thing being an abomination, all the commandments and so on. What were the purpose of the hundreds of commandments within the bible, if not that they be obeyed?

The Bible is the history of mankind's imperfection by choice, and the possible alternative solution. To point at examples of moral failings from your position thousands of years later is, ironically, a bit premature and missing the point. All you really need to do is recognize a very simple Biblical truth, which is this: put simply. The first man was given the planet given that he keep in mind his creator's advice and protection were essential, much like that of a parent. He rejected this guidance and protection and everything we see around us is an alleged result of that. All the suffering, all of the injustice is a product of that which you continue to reject. Adam said, in a sense: I'm going to run this show, and God, in a sense, responded okay, fair enough, let's see how that goes.

You're just trying to put a pleasant spin in what I've been saying all along; for all your bluster about me not being well informed regarding the bible (which, it must be said, is simply an assertion on your part; you haven't yet backed up a single part of your argument with anything nearing evidence) the actual content of your point here is largely the same. You have a god who could possibly stop slavery from happening, but just doesn't because someone completely unrelated disobeyed once. For that, he's willing to let innocent people, completely unconnected to that disobedience, suffer the kinds of indignities you'd find unacceptable from other people. You aren't improving the moral content of the scenario, you're just making half-hearted excuses for it.

It seems strange to me that a god that doesn't exist gets the blame for our stupidity.

Don't be obtuse, I've repeatedly explained that my position is that, were one to come away from reading the bible convinced that the christian god exists, worship of that god would be entirely immoral. You claim to have become christian via reading the bible, meaning you saw all the immorality that god either directly participated in or just let happen because he was having a millenia long temper tantrum over a dude eating a piece of his fruit, and you decided to worship that god anyway. I don't believe that god exists, but you do, and therefore this is a problem for your worldview.

It seems strange to me that my willingness to entertain your beliefs on their own merits is such an alien concept to you.

What is your problem with slavery as presented in the Bible? That God did it?

That god allowed it to happen under his watch and, in fact, facilitated it by providing rules for it, when he had the power and authority to simply put a stop to it.

All the while not existing?

Within the context of your beliefs, he does exist. I'm talking to you, not to objective reality.

Who created slavery, man or God?

God, ultimately, since obviously he had the power to create a world without it, but went the other way.

But regardless, what you're saying is irrelevant: if person A creates a machine that does nothing but enslave people, and person B has constant access to a switch that turns that machine off, but he just doesn't, for no relevant reason, isn't it true that person B is behaving immorally, even though he didn't create the machine in the first place? Inaction can be immoral too, you know.

And, again, what is specifically your problem with slavery, not in general, but specifically as presented by the Bible?

So, you're seriously asking me what I find objectionable about a concept that treats people as property and allows them to be abused, killed and raped? That's actually the question you're asking me now?

What are you even talking about? What is morality? What is presented by people of a specific time and place as being right, correct?

Incorrect, I'm not a moral relativist; we can objectively derive what benefits or harms thinking agents, as we live in a universe with predictable physical effects both to ourselves and the world around us. Thus, we can determine what is immoral and moral based around that simple measure, and add complexity from there; slavery, as described in the bible, causes harm to people.

Your moral judgement of the ancients is irrelevant.

Why? Because you said so?

First of all, to kidnap anyone for the purpose of selling them into slavery was punishable by death.

Yeah, you had to rely on the foreigners neighboring you to do that.

A Jewish person could sell themselves into slavery in order to work off a debt, or pay for theft or property damage and then be released.

Irrelevant.

A slave could have their own business, make their own money, live life as they choose and often were a trusted authority figure in the household or community. Joseph, for example, a slave in Egypt, was the second most powerful and wealthy man in Egypt.

Citation needed.

Slaves taken from the nations outside of Israel were prisoners of war, and were protected by the law.

That law being "they are your property." The entire system is immoral, regardless of how nice you might make certain parts of it.

Intent to kill or the murder of ones slave was a capital offense. These are just a few things.

This is a lie: if you beat your slaves so that they died a few days later, you were in the clear.

Again, you need to be more specific and logically you need to more carefully grasp the meaning of the Bible. In the case of claims of genocide, for example, who specifically are you referring to, what were the normal policies of warfare of the Israelite once Jehovah began to deal specifically with them? What was the purpose of the alleged genocide? Things like that.

I get the distinct feeling you're about to make excuses for, say, the genocide of the Amalekites, which is pretty gross.

Again, you are giving vague examples based upon your uninformed interpretation and judging the moral fiber of a people that lived thousands of years ago by your current standards. So your case is weak even though your heart is in the right place. Even if you had a point it would be, unfortunately lost.

Vague examples? I provided the verse. Uninformed? You won't say how, you just assert that it is so as though that's sufficient to dismiss me out of hand. I can't judge people from thousands of years ago? The fuck I can't: morality is not relative to time periods.

Now stop this sophistic dodging and answer the questions.

Secondly, I can name respected scientists in many fields who not only not believe in evolution, but also teach the Bible in their spare time. So there may be some disagreement with current science and the Bible regarding the flood and evolution but there isn't as much disagreement as you might suspect.

Betcha you can't name a single scientist in a field relevant to biology (read: who would actually be in a position to know) that doesn't accept evolution; given that 97% of scientists accept evolution, when you say that there isn't as much disagreement as you might think, that's true, but it doesn't serve your side at all. That lack of disagreement leans almost exclusively toward acceptance of evolution.

Remember, science can't test the supernatural so they have no authority to state a position on it, really.

Science can't test the supernatural? Because you say so? As though fiat assertion is enough to absolve your religion of its burden of proof?

[Hatshepsut]

I'm on my phone and looking up the reference is unwieldy so I'll get to it later tonight ... but I don't think you're correct about Jubilee liberation, Hash.

Thanks for the heads-up. It's in Leviticus chap. 25. I was correct and wrong both. Jubilee came every 50 years, not 7 like I thought. Although there was a 7 x 7 + 1 computation and the 7-year subdivisions may have been of importance, as "agricultural sabbaticals" of some sort. Israelites in servitude went free at the jubilee (Lev. 25:40), but foreigners did not. 50% isn't a bad score when I haven't read this stuff in a quarter century.  

[Ravenshire]

Okay. Let me ask you a simple question. What is the soul? Is it immortal, meaning does it die?

Perhaps you could provide some evidence of this thing you call a soul before asking our thoughts on it.

---

Six pages in and no evidence provided for the existence of God, just an unsubstantiated declaration that some of The Bible is true, woefully misinterpreted by believers and is simultaneously "The most accurate and honest history of mankind ever produced". Poe or imbecile?

Poe, imbecile or Drich? This guy is sounding awfully familiar.

---

No one in the history of science at this point can establish with certainty if the standing still of the sun is actually possible.

Wow. You are completely fucking ignorant of how celestial mechanics works and what "the standing still of the sun" would actually entail. I would suggest you get an education that doesn't involve a priest/pastor/shaman/medicine man.

[Pyrrho]

Just call me "No one".  The sun cannot stand still.

Wait, aren't we talking earth standing still here? 

You scientists with your fancy ideas!  Read your Bible; it clearly says that the sun stood still.  (Joshua 10:13)

The way you are approaching the matter, you will next be telling us that the Bible is a bunch of ramblings of primitive, superstitious goat herders!


Really, the Bible so is very wrong, it would have to be corrected to be just plain wrong.  As you are right to point out, it isn't the sun that would be standing still for the appearance of the sun to be standing still.  And that never happened, either.  It is wrong in the story it tells, and it is wrong in its explanation of what would have happened if the story were true.  The Bible has layer upon layer of being wrong.

[Hatshepsut]

First of all, the origins of science and education didn't get their start in the secular world, but rather in the religious.

Which I think is under-appreciated. Religious thought may have been a big part of what motivated human beings to ask questions about origins and causes for natural phenomena in the first place. Alongside financial accounting, it played a role in the development of literacy: Egypt had its sbAyt "room of instruction" and pr-anx "house of life" where scribes learnt to write, attached to the temple establishments of major state gods. The first European universities, modeled after cathedral and monastery schools, were founded by kings in cooperation with the religious orders that provided their staffs.

When claims of the supernatural are said to intervene with the natural world, science...is the ideal method by which to test such claims. Consider Joshua 10:13. We know these events did not happen.

Although there have been experiments on ESP card reading, little debunking on Earth science questions relies on direct tests, but on theoretical calculations instead. Of the Earth's angular momentum and consideration of how much external force would be needed to effect the braking. Of known sources of external forces, mainly the sun and the moon. And I'm not sure anyone has even bothered to do the calculations; for a physicist educated intuition is enough to say no. So, it's a confidence game. We're now sufficiently confident in science that supernatural claims are dismissed with no analysis since it's assumed such claims are bogus.

I can certainly understand this attitude, given the huge number of charlatans populating the paranormal. Yet if some phenomenon new to our science ever does occur, and doesn't announce itself too blatantly, I'd bet we could overlook it for decades in our smug unsuspecting state. The nature of light was considered settled for more than 100 years before things like X-rays and the photoelectric effect were discovered.

It is wrong in the story it tells, and it is wrong in its explanation of what would have happened if the story were true.  The Bible has layer upon layer of being wrong.

Or, what may be wrong is the way in which we read it. We're reading the damn thing like it was a newspaper cum history textbook and both sides in the so-called science/religion debate have fallen into the trap. The same arguments over creation, Noah's Ark, and Methuselah's lifespan are repeated endlessly, year after year, with no end in sight because each side is satisfied it is right. They are just shouting past each other to be heard by the curious young wallflowers on the sidelines.

Joshua 10:12-13 is actually a brief poem or song, rendered in NRSV English as

Sun, stand still at Gibeon,
   and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,
   until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

So we see that it isn't the factual report of a natural event like we would write up at Mt. St. Helens, but a piece of bombastic war propaganda designed to elevate the morale of Hebrew tribes in the midst of their conflicts with other Canaanites.

[Angrboda]

Wait, aren't we talking earth standing still here? 

You scientists with your fancy ideas!  Read your Bible; it clearly says that the sun stood still.  (Joshua 10:13)

The way you are approaching the matter, you will next be telling us that the Bible is a bunch of ramblings of primitive, superstitious goat herders!


Really, the Bible so is very wrong, it would have to be corrected to be just plain wrong.  As you are right to point out, it isn't the sun that would be standing still for the appearance of the sun to be standing still.  And that never happened, either.  It is wrong in the story it tells, and it is wrong in its explanation of what would have happened if the story were true.  The Bible has layer upon layer of being wrong.

Actually, if you rotate the rest of the solar system around the earth's axis of rotation, it could be made to appear as if the sun stood still without stopping the rotation of the earth.

[Theoretical Skeptic]

Actually, if you rotate the rest of the solar system around the earth's axis of rotation, it could be made to appear as if the sun stood still without stopping the rotation of the earth.

What is this?! How did you get in here? Someone with the ability to think outside the box?!

[Rhondazvous]

My introduction here seemed to incite some interest, and surprisingly, some doubt about my having been an atheist and after picking up a Bible, becoming a believer. It doesn't seem so remarkable to me, perhaps since it has been 21 years since I became a believer.

I came from the Bible belt. We were surrounded by self righteous religious hypocrites and I despised them. They spouted silly superstitious nonsense, judged anyone outside their mini culture as beneath them, competed with each other in a selfish and mean spirited jealousy, and put on a phony show to impress with their shallow archaic tradition.

My dad had been raised an atheist, his side of the family didn't believe, didn't pretend, didn't participate in any religious nonsense. My mom's side of the family had been somewhat religious in the sense of my above impression of what it was like to be religious; angry, bitter, mean, hateful, jealous, ignorant hypocrites and she had rejected it. She had told them all, in her inimitable fashion that she wasn't going to be a part of it and she wasn't. She more or less cut all ties to her family.

I think that when I was a kid I saw a lot of the attributes in my parents that I was told the religious nuts around us possessed and I saw a flicker of redemptive quality in a message of love and hope that lied buried deep beneath the human imperfections of the religious that I didn't see in the former, but as I grew into my teens that would change, primarily due to the hypocrisy of the religious kids I grew up with. This was especially true when I discovered that all of their parents warned against them having too much to do with me, an outsider. Though their parents didn't like the way I dressed, didn't like the music I blared, didn't like my individuality and the fact that their nonsense didn't frighten me into submission the alarming fact was that the children of the religious were doing all of the things that their parents claimed my irreligious lifestyle involved. This especially bothered me because I wasn't the one drinking, stealing, doing drugs and having sex, the religious kids were.

In my late teens it got to the point where I was so disgusted with their fake morality and self-righteousness that I was contemplating some acts of protest that, today I'm somewhat embarrassed by, one of which was leaving pornographic material from magazines on their windshield wipers at local church gatherings, and attending their meetings to disrupt them.

I started to think that this was unhealthy and perhaps I should take a more constructive approach, so in by my mid twenties I decided to pick up a Bible and debunk their beliefs through their alleged holy book. The Internet was getting very popular at this time and I went on line and began to discover the truth of the Bible and how it had been so terribly misrepresented by these people. I became a believer, not in the religious traditions of man, but of the Bible itself. Over time I studied briefly all of the other primary religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism and Taoism. Also the history of Christianity and the influence Greek philosophy and mythology in mainstream traditional Christianity.

21 years later and I've learned a great deal about the real Bible, as opposed to religious tradition, and the more I learn the more I am confident of my belief in it.

The  "real Bible?" You mean the one that says in the first chapter of Genesis that god created the grass and the trees before he created the sun and the moon?   You mean the one that shows fathers how to sell their daughters into sexual slavery (Exodus 21:7-11)?

I find that people who don't believe the Bible know a lot more about it and about Christian history than those who do believe it.

Leaving the church because you're disgusted at fellow Christians doesn't make you an atheist. To be an atheist, you have to be strong enough to stop lying to yourself about what is clearly truth and reality.  You have to be strong enough to not settle for comfortable answers and convoluted explanations.

[rexbeccarox]

You took the opportunity to assign viewpoints and accuse someone of doing something he never even alluded to; you are dishonest.

Do you have children and do you celebrate Christmas with them?

I have a 17-year-old son with whom I celebrate Christmas, not as a celebration of the birth of a fictional god, but in honor of the idea "peace on Earth, good will towards men".

The point is, you most likely instilled in your young son some materialistic fantasy based upon mythology, customs and tradition that you knew wasn't true but presented as truth to your impressionable child in order to mislead, and control him and yet you have a big problem with anyone else incorporating these alleged tenets. Atheism is hypocritical, nonsensical, uninformed antiquated polemic pontification. Social and political frustration primarily expressed poorly by failed Christians with a Utopian quasi scientific ideology equally uninformed and hinged upon the failed metaphysical experiment of evolution. And you, I suspect, think that is original and clever. It isn't, so why not be more tolerant of other people's paradigm? 

Yup... and?

[Pyrrho]

You scientists with your fancy ideas!  Read your Bible; it clearly says that the sun stood still.  (Joshua 10:13)

The way you are approaching the matter, you will next be telling us that the Bible is a bunch of ramblings of primitive, superstitious goat herders!


Really, the Bible so is very wrong, it would have to be corrected to be just plain wrong.  As you are right to point out, it isn't the sun that would be standing still for the appearance of the sun to be standing still.  And that never happened, either.  It is wrong in the story it tells, and it is wrong in its explanation of what would have happened if the story were true.  The Bible has layer upon layer of being wrong.

Actually, if you rotate the rest of the solar system around the earth's axis of rotation, it could be made to appear as if the sun stood still without stopping the rotation of the earth.

Your way, the Bible is still wrong, because the sun would be moving, not standing still.