Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
well if you know or study the original language the Bible was written then you would see that in the creation story when we say and translate on the first day God created, it can and most likely does mean eon as in in the first eon God created, this is too little known and leads to many discusions with differing views but in reality if you know that it can be translated from its original launguage as day or eon you begin to see that the Bible can support virtually the same theories if not the same as science.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
and the creation story says that in the begining there was no darkness or light no life or death therefor it was created from itself i think we all get to hung up on the translation of days.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
Quote:
he deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.
Saints are a myth made up by catholics and aplies to the catholic religion not the many protestant christian religions ie presbyterian, methodist, epispicol, etc.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
Sounds like a loop hole bible bangers are promoting. I honestly doubt that when the bible was written that they had comprehension of the word eon. cmon man.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
Quote:
Originally Posted by sd6515
Saints are a myth made up by catholics and aplies to the catholic religion not the many protestant christian religions ie presbyterian, methodist, epispicol, etc.
Tell Thomas Paine that, not me.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
sd6515 I think you've missed my point. My objection with Christianity (for the basis of this discussion I'll stick to this religion, although the same applies for Judaism, Islam, etc.) is not necessarily with the believability of its texts, however far-fetched they may be. Rather, the thing that bothers me is that these religions claim that if you do not believe what they have to say (Jesus is the son of God, he died for your sins, blah blah blah) you will endure eternal pain and suffering, even if you live a perfectly moral and altruistic life in terms of how you treat yourself and others. Then, these religions try and equate believing in them with believing in secular historical accounts. Like I said in my original post, believing in commonly accepted accounts of the Civil War does not require you to also believe that non-believers in said accounts suffer eternal damnation.
I don't see why it's so hard for some people to see how demented it is to send a guy to hell simply because he believes in, for example, Muhammad instead of Jesus. Do you really think Ghandi (a Hindu) should burn for the rest of eternity because he didn't "accept Jesus as his savior"? When posed with this sort of question, many Christians like to answer by saying things like, "well that's for God to decide, not me," but that's just a cop-out. Being Christian requires unequivocal belief in the Bible, which in turn requires unequivocal belief that accepting Jesus is the only way to avoid eternal punishment, and unequivocal belief that people like Ghandi will go to hell. I think punishing someone not for their actions but instead for not believing one far-fetched story in favor of another is ridiculously spiteful and mean-spirited, to say the least.
Another thing that's wrong with the notion that religious accounts are on par with secular historical accounts is the fact that secular historians are entirely willing to consider the idea that they are completely wrong, while religious people, by definition, are not. If a secular historian were to find evidence that suggests his previous beliefs about something might be incorrect, he'd sit down and try to figure out if the overall collection of evidence still supports his beliefs. If it doesn't, then he'd be willing to change his beliefs. On the other hand, Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. have been taught to NEVER, under any circumstances, consider the fact that they may be wrong in their beliefs. There's a massive difference between this mindset and that of secular historians.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
Most of these points I completely agree with. I do not believe people should suffer eternal damnation for not believing in God. I don't agree that Christianity or other religions should concentrate on that because I do not believe this is completely true. One major reason is there is many reason not to believe in the Bible, most if not all are not even in our control, be it raised in a different religion or country or any other reason or situation that is not our control. Because of my views I am a Christian but do not belong to or attend a church, I carry my own beliefs in God and Jesus and do not judge any others, I believe that God will damn you for working against him militously as a believer, but not for simply not believing, I do not agree with this at all. In fact I believe the Bible instructs us not to judge which includes telling people they will go to hell if they don't believe.
Also I do agree with you that even as a believer myself I do not accept the Bible as fact like I do a history book, I believe in it because of my faith and as a whole not every individual story or fact. I also agree that it is crazy how so many believers think they are renouncing there faith in some way by denying that anything in the Bible or our history as a religion could be different then we were taught.
And finally I also believe that some of the worst people and attrocities were/are commited by religous people in the name of religion. From the Crusades to the radical Islam to fundalmentalist Christians going around telling everyone they are going to hell.
Sorry if I came off really agressive and defensive in other posts but igorant arguments tend to send me into a rant. I am not speaking of you when I say this but some of the other posts I had responded to. I thoughly enjoyed reading your logical and on point response and as you see I actually agree with most of what you are saying. I just went off on tangents in response to other post about this topic and apologize for that but when people quote the Bible who don't believe in it as support for there argument using out of context verses totaling less then 1 page of over a 1000 page book, which using that logic, you could change the meaning of even the most accurate history book. And then responding to logical refutes of there misinformed, misguided, or simply uneducated views with don't tell me tell Thomas Paine it gets me a little touchy. It is ignorant people like that on all sides of any topic that leave us all stuck ranting and preaching our views to each other expecting them to listen to us when we don't listen to them, it leaves all of us stuck and damning each other which is not in the best interest of anyone and does not lead to anything productive.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
There have been hundreds if not thousands of historians who can verify the accounts of the historical events you talk of, please go and find me one person that can verify the events in the Bible e.g. The crucifixion, the Romans were meticulous in their historical records, yet there is not a shred of evidence to show that the crucifixion even took place.
And i doubt it ever did.
Would you rather believe Hitler was a figment of the worlds imagination and that Auschwitz never existed?
I thought not, lets not get this muddled up - there is a clear distinction between what can be proven as actual factual history and that of which is built from myth and ledged, for example, we know that the Aztecs and the Mayas existed, we know this from evidence i.e. Deep underground excavations and physical evidence of civilisation - however, there is little evidence to support the existence of Quetzalquatle (the ancient serpent God whom the indigenous people of that region of the world believed in).
So saying believing in the healer of the blind and the man whom walked on water would be as sensible (historicaly speaking) as saying I whom believe in modern history also believe in the great tinman of the african jungle.
Argument made by religious people that just isn't valid
Quote:
Originally Posted by miley
I think that the fact that reading and writing at that period in time(biblical times) was not such a common thing for people to do and the fact the the majority of the bibical texts(the christian at least) were recording a long long time after the fact. Ever heard of a thing called a tall tale. Now i'm not saying that they are all lies but it would have been very easy for the generations of people passing the stories down to alter them slightly each time. Civil war accounts were documented as they occurred and copied many many times. That is the difference between the bibical and the historical thing.
we can apprecitate the tremendous wealth of manuscript authority for the new testment by comparing it to textual material available to support other notable ancient writings.
The history of thucydides {460-400 BC} is available to us from only 8 manuscripts dated about AD 900 almost thirteen hundred years after he wrote it.
The manuscripts of the history of Herodotus are likewise late and scarce. And yet ,as F.F.Bruce, Rylands Professer of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, concludes," No classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earlist manuscripts of there works which are of use to us are over 1,300 years later then the originals.
The quantity of the new testment matarial is almost embarrassing in comparison with other works of antiquity.
We have over 5,600 greek manuscripts of the bible. The whole being written before the fall of jerusalam in A.D. 70.
