(January 1, 2022 at 1:59 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Dont even get me started about that stupid non boat. I was excited, at first...but...meh.
It’s a very solidly built non boat.
I noticed the beam supports (metal sheet) with 4 or 5 bolts going through. It’s probably made of the finest modern materials, like iron, iron carbide, manganese. Perhaps some nickel also. The bolts look 2 cm in diameter. And the nuts, 4 cm outer diameter.
I didn’t know that Noah was a toolmaker. He also located a few mines and was running a steel mill.
(March 28, 2021 at 11:04 pm)Belacqua Wrote: (March 28, 2021 at 10:51 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: I will read the link he provided and extract the statistics later on.
This is the main thing.
Please note the bibliography, and all the sources cited in the text. It is solid history.
Sorry for the delay. It took me some time to relocate this thread.
Source provided by Belacqua:
Source:
https://historyforatheists.com/2021/03/t...iteralism/
CLAIMS MADE BY THIS TEXT
Claims made by this text:
1. many atheists distort history
2. Due to the visibility of these groups, a lot of people – atheists, as well as believers – make the mistaken assumption that this is how religious groups have always read their scriptures.
It follows the above line (many atheists distort history) with this:
“And when referring to “atheists” in this article he is talking about the anti-theistic New Atheists who are the focus of History for Atheists, not atheists generally.”
Another line of interest from the text is:
“A lot of criticism of believers is based on how irrational, impossible and anti-scientific such a reading of the Bible has to be”
^^^^^It looks like what is bugging the writer of the article is that atheists read Genesis as a literal story and claim that it is unscientific.
The article writer is Lee Clarke.
About Lee Clarke
Lee is studying for a doctorate in Philosophy at Nottingham Trent University. He holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy from the same institution and also a M.A. in Theology and Religion from the University of Birmingham. Lee is an agnostic who shares many of my concerns about the way many atheists distort history and he offered to write this detailed article because the history of Biblical exegesis is a focus of his research.
END OF About Lee Clarke
“What all these statements seem to imply is that the contradictions and immoral events within religious scriptures have been missed or ignored by all those stupid, irrational religious people throughout the centuries who were enslaved to a literal readings of their scriptures”
==I don’t think that the religious elite (master leaders) missed those things or that they were stupid.
In the old days, most of the population was illiterate and never had access to any of this so-called holy texts. They relied on their priests. The priests knew how to read and told the people about what the sacred texts contain.
I don’t think that the master leaders sat down with the common believer and point to them the contradictions.
What immoral events are there in the Bible?
Also, what contradictions are present in Genesis?
Belacqua’s argument fails. It does not support the notion that the population considered the Genesis story as allegory.
“Amongst them, some did indeed take a more literal stance as we will see, but as I have said, literalism in the eras I will discuss was only one form of interpretation, it was hardly ever the only one used and hardly ever the same as modern literalism.”
==Ya, ok. He says “some”. I’m not seeing a surveymonkey or Pew statistic.
The only time statistics was mentioned was at the beginning of the article and it talks about 2014 Pew numbers and 2017 Gallup numbers.
Belacqua, that’s not the period that I was talking about.
“to disprove the idea that believers have always interpreted their scriptures in a completely literal manner”
==Can I see the numbers already?
“As already stated, the principal mode of exegesis that was applied to the Bible was allegorical in nature.”
==Just give me the numbers already. What percentage of the people interpreted Genesis as literal and non-literal?
What did the non-literalists, from centuries ago, believe?
“If it was read that the gods did something in the poems that could have been deemed morally or religiously offensive to the reader, the passages in question were deemed to actually mean something else that was hidden beneath the surface meaning of the words.”
==Yes, when I discuss immoral passages in the Bible, the believer defends it by saying that I have to read it in context.
I think the reason for this is that the believer wants to tell me “I believe in this and I worship this god and also that god is not immoral and I am not worshiping a genocidal maniac.”
This is something that I have seen many times.
In some cases, the believer says that “The jewish god is the creator of all things, he is the rule maker and he can do whatever he wants.” <===In this case, the believer accepts that the jewish god is a genocidal maniac.
But the question is, does the believer approve of such actions? Is he in league with the jewish god? Is he willing to kill, damage the bodies of people, cause physical harm and psychological pain to people?
“Rabbis saw no problem with actively changing the wording of scripture to suit a new interpretation.”
==How many rabbis? This also doesn’t tell us what they thought to the people.
How did the jewish god create the universe, the Earth, the Sun, life?
“The rabbis and exegetes at Yavneh even went so far as to directly challenge God himself.”
...........”These stories provide further evidence that religious believers did not always interpret their scriptures literally. “
==No it doesn’t provide evidence. Challenging their god only means one thing. That these rabbis have chosen to challenge their god, their belief system.
EXAMPLE: People walk away from their home once in a while. Eventually, they always return to their home.
“Even if they were believed to have occurred historically, do these stories – Moses knowing less and feeling inferior to Rabbi Akiva”’
==It is possible that certain rabbis had a big chip on their shoulder and claimed that they know better than Moses.
Again, this doesn’t tell us what the majority of the rabbis believed, what the majority of the people believed. No surveymonkey or Pew statistics are available.
“Although, like Philo, we can reasonably make the assumption that the rabbis believed in the Bible historically, but they clearly did not read and interpret is as such and as we have seen, they had no qualms about wrenching verses from their original context and joining together parts of the text that previously had no connection.”
==It’s called the tanakh. Just because some rabbi plays lego with his tanakh doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe in the words of the Bible literally.
“This should be a serious rebuttal to the view expressed by both believers and atheists that religious believers have always read their scriptures in a literal manner”
==Sounds like someone has claimed that every single person in the past, perhaps between 100 BCE and 200 CE, had a literal interpretation of the tanakh and Bible.
Tim O'Neill is saying no. There is a certain number of rabbis that did not literally interpret the tanakh.
No actual statistics is being given by Tim O'Neill.
“Many scholars have studied the Church Fathers over the centuries and modern ones have all come to the conclusion that completely literal interpretation of scripture, especially in a modern sense, was not something the Fathers endorsed or agreed with.”
==”Many” is considered a weasel word in wikipedia and it is discouraged. To have a balanced article, provide actual numbers. These are the questions that I have. How many scholars in total? Which percentage claim that “completely literal interpretation of scripture.....was not something the Fathers endorsed or agreed with.” and which percentage claim that the opposite is true?
The parts that discuss Genesis are these:
1. It mentions Philo of Alexandria (20 BC-50 AD)
Apparently, Philo has a problem with the 6 day creation event. He seems to be saying that time did not exist during those 6 day creation event.
^^^^^This is not a matter of allegory. It is more of matter of what you consider time to be. So, if you don't have an Earth and you don't have a Sun, you don't have an Earth spinning on itself but does this mean that clocks stop working? No, a clock will work fine. Time still moves on.
Philo writes:
"It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; because all time is only the space of days and nights, and these things the motion of the sun as he passes over the earth and under the earth does necessarily make. But the sun is a portion of heaven so that one must confess that time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore, it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world."
^^^^^I would say that if there is no time, then the universe in which the jewish god exists is frozen and so is the jewish god. A frozen universe is a broken universe. The jewish god or aliens in it are frozen in time and can't move or think or do anything. A clock in a frozen universe would be showing the same time forever. In fact, not even photons would be moving.
Philo of Alexandria still thinks that there was an Adam and Eve and that Adam is the first human and later, the human woman was made.
The webpage makes no mention what Philo of Alexandria exactly beleives as to the start of the universe.
I don't have access to his writings so I am going to conclude that the apologist who wrote that page could not extract anything relevant except for the time comment.
Philo is not a OEC. He isn't telling us that the univers/Earth is billions of years old.
It is also possible that Philo thinks there was no passage of time when the jewish god created things.
Perhaps it seems silly to Philo that the jewish god would take 6 days, so he believed that it was an instantaneous creation event.
In other words, Philo is a YEC of the 6000 y minus 7 days.
2. It mentions Origen of Alexandria (184-253 AD)
Origen, just like Philo, has a problem with the 6 day creation event. He seems to be saying that there is no such thing as day and night if there is no Sun/Moon/Stars.
He writes:
Now who is there, pray, possessed of understanding, that will regard the statement as appropriate, that the first day, and the second, and the third, in which also both evening and morning are mentioned, existed without sun, and moon, and stars.
^^^^^Again, it is more of matter of what you consider time to be. So, if you don't have an Earth and you don't have a Sun, you don't have an Earth spinning on itself but does this mean that clocks stop working? No, a clock will work fine. Time still moves on.
Origen seems to be saying that the Genesis story is fake however, the webpage does not go into details.
But, if Origen believes that the Genesis story of creation is fake, what then does Origin believe?
Does Origen believe that the jewish god did anything?
Did the jewish god create Adam as the first man?
What was the start of the universe?
The webpage doesn't give us much details.
It just tells us that Origen doesn't read the Bible literaly and moves on to the next person on the list.
Origen was trying to fuse Plato's philosophy with Christianity. He is a greek.
There is this source:
Source:
https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/calvi...eationist/
We should acknowledge that Origen was an outlier, as he tended toward a very allegorical view of certain sections of Scripture. However, as far as his stance on the age of the earth, he clearly recognized and defended that the Bible indicates a young earth rather than the proposed ideas from the Greeks and others who were challenging biblical history in his day. In a major apologetics work countering a scathing attack on Christianity from the writings of the pagan philosopher Celsus, Origen said,
After this, secretly wishing to attack the Mosaic cosmogony that the world is not yet ten thousand years old, but is much less than this, Celsus agrees with those who say the world is uncreated, although he hides his real intention.19
In the most basic sense, Origen was also a young earth (much less than 10,000 years old) creationist (the world was not “uncreated”).
