In reply to silveroak (msg #444):

Crap.  Now I have to get someone to change my tattoo.

Can i just say that this 'discovery' sounds fishy to me? From what i have learned early Christians followed many of customs Jews have, and one thing we do is bury all religious texts that are damaged in sacred sites, like a graveyards and such, so find such a text not in the right context is strange.

Ok peeps the whole 666 thing you do know the meaning of it right? From what i was taught Emperor Nero was the one referred to, his name added up to 666, he was considered a threat to Judaism, he wanted to crush any sign of rebellion in Israel and he wanted to erect a statue of himself in the Temple, and it was Roman troops that destroyed the second temple...

The way I was taught about the bible was very much the fact that it was written by men, i remember one teacher theorizing that it was probably the most learned men doing so, so that it was likely the Moses probably wrote Exodus what with him once being a prince of Egypt. There's whole books discussing the interpretation of the interpretation not to mention a large amount of orthodox men, where that is all they do all day.

Texts have been found with each- and clearly 666 won out in teh ened, but which was the orriginal is something tehre is simply no direct proof of, the earliest documented discussion on the topic is one of conjecture. Nero, from what teh texts says, adds up to 616, but in terms of naming an emporer antichrist Caligula would make much more sense, since he was contemporary to Jesus and named himself a living God.
But to the point of being certain of the litteral translation of the bible I think it drives a nail in teh coffin- the fact that we can't even be certain because it was being argued both ways in the second centure AD indicates that errors were certainly cropping up prior to that date, and being replicated. Which also means that the idea that some method was effective at preventing such errors is demonstrably hyperbole.

First, nothing in the Bible (we're talking about the Bible, right? -- Sorry, lost my train of thought because it's been awhile) says everything in it is true.

That was decided based on the Council of Nicea, which took the books they thought were best to canonize and put them together into what we now call "the Bible."  There was no divine intervention (or even claim of divinity to that decision that I'm aware of) stating that our current Bible is actually 100% correct.


I think this is a sad but true fact, based primarily on the fact that most people don't investigate their own religions (or perhaps just don't think deeply enough about them) to realize the nuances and history involved.


I think you leapfrogged the issue here.  The Moses with horns issue is a translation issue. The resurrection is an engrained theory and principle repeated over and over so, at least in the larger sense, if not specifics, is nothing similar.  In other words, the actual text of the Bible does not say Moses has horns, so it is not actually incorrect there.


I agree, primarily in the South.  It is one of the hardest places for LDS missionaries to go because of the close-mindedness of the people and clinging to literal interpretations and the belief that God no longer has prophets and nothing in the world is as true as, or complete as, the Bible.  (My wife's family is from the South...I should know!)  :)

Well, there could be other explanations. Like Jesus was crucified on the Wednesday. With Passover falling on a Thursday that year, and the Sabbath being on the Saturday, it allows for events to occur and be three actual 24 hour periods.

http://www.bible-truth.org/WhatDayDidChristDie.html

Trust in the Lord, do you see how you're doing precisely what I'm saying that YOU CAN DO because you're a believer?  And, can you put yourself into the shoes of a Mormon and at least imagine that reasonable people have thought about this "apparent contradiction" for which they have some "link" to explain it away?

That's all I'm saying.

Faith is full of notions that contradict.  (Look at the Faith / Words debate, we could add "Free will" v "Determinism" or "God as sovereign" v "the Buddy/Friend Personal Jesus)

The point is to show you that you only see this problem because of your OUTSIDER position.  I mean nothing in what you shared with me was even a little bit persuasive to me as non-Xian. In fact it came off as nothing more than a post-hoc fix.

But this isn't about being "right" or "wrong" it's about the ability for people of faith to have a "deeper sense" of what's going on that is denied a person of no faith or another faith.

And this is nothing new.  It's like when Nicodemus says, "How can I renter my Mum's privates" ...to be born again.  What I think is more interesting, is Jesus spends less time explaining these things than we do here :) LOL

I'm currently of the notion that, if a God exists, when it comes to the nature of their creation, any holy text written by men, however inspired they may be, must inevitably pale in comparison to the accuracy of what God himself has written.

Reality has little room for interpretation or inaccuracy; belief that you can fly will not stop you from dying when you jump off a cliff.  Only through studying creation can you reach the understanding necessary to truly fly.

nods agreeably, offsets jaws>
and some parts have been intentionally deleted or altered, perpetuating the Great Apostasy!
Wolf Bureau search and rescue project: <a href=http://www.monkaya.ucoz.com/Wolf_Bureau/Projects/Great_Apostasy.htm> The Great Apostasy </a>

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This message was last edited by the player at 06:27, Fri 01 Mar 2013.

The bible has been proven over, and over to be true, this has been done in many ways. All translations have been done, with utmost care. Sources for the bible have been confirmed to be true. Archilogist TODAY are using the bible, to find more Archilogical finds.

Pieces of the bible have been proven to be true. It's a mistake to confuse one line as the entire body of work.

I disagree multiple sections, events and locations have been confirmed. The events of Jesus life have been confirmed in many sources. Much of the bible have been confirmed in many scientific ways.

What are you disagreeing with exactly?

Conservatives believe that much (and in some cases all) of the Bible are still believable and non-contradictory.

There are an equal number of historians who take much of the Bible as little more than myth and fractured historical elements mixed in with some great storytelling by the authors.

As we head into the Easter weekend it's clear that if you believe that it's possible for individuals to come back from the dead then you'll believe anything that the Bible says.

If you start from an assumption that dead people don't come back then you'll find other ways of dealing with the Bible and it's texts.

Those initial assumptions seem to drive more of the debate than anything else.

In reply to Kagin (msg # 453):

I'd say that's a somewhat simplistic way to look at it.  The bible isn't a single work.  It's multiple books, written over a large period of time, and written by many different authors.  That some parts of some of the books are factually correct doesn't imply that all parts of all the books are correct.

Think of it this way:  if I say "My name is Tycho, I live at 123 main street anytown, US, and yesterday I saw a flying pink unicorn fight a giant robot controlled by a vampire at the 7-11 near my house," you probably wouldn't believe me.  If someone goes to 'check out' my story, and finds that I do indeed live at 123 main street, and that there really is a 7-11 near my house, you could, I suppose, say that parts of my story had been 'confirmed,' but that in no way means you should believe the other parts of my story.

Similarly with the bible.  I don't think anyone claims that every single word in the bible is factually incorrect.  Even it's harshest critics will happily agree that parts of it are accurate.  We can all agree, I think, that there is good evidence in support of parts of what the bible says.  But making the leap from there to "the bible has been confirmed" is going too far, I'd say.  To me, it's clear that the bible can't be 100% correct, simply because parts of it contradict itself.  But most believes are convinced there are ways to reconcile any contradictions, and that's sort of where things get stuck.  To a believer, any explanation, no matter how unlikely, that removes an apparent contradiction will be easier to accept than it would be to accept that a contradiction really exists.  To a non-believer, that will not be true.  Discussions tend to devolve to shouting matches at that point, unfortunately.

There's also the issue that not even christians can agree on what certain parts of the bible really say/mean.  They all tend to claim that their view is the 'obviously correct,' but if not even all believers can agree on which parts are literal and which are metaphorical, or which parts are "for everyone for all time," and which are "just for those people at that time," it doesn't seem to me like anyone claim that their position is 'obviously' correct.

Finally, while parts of the bible have been backed up by scientific findings, others have been contradicted by scientific or historical findings (the age of the earth being the most well-known example).  Focusing entirely on the positive results, and ignoring the negative results isn't a good way to learn the truth, in my view.

I've seen this misconception a lot of times, so in a non-critical way I'd like to explain it.

Christians don't believe that people come back from the dead on a regular basis, or even once in a blue moon. Christians believe Jesus came back from the dead, and that it was a special occasion, not likely to be repeated in our lifetimes.

I've also seen this phrased as "We know people don't come back from the dead. How can you believe someone did?". The answer is that we believe Jesus was not just an ordinary person, and what's impossible for others is not impossible for him.

The NT reports multiple times when people came back from the dead.  But even if it was only once, that's still once more than those who do not believe in miracles will possibly believe and will find other ways to explain what happened.

Debates on these lines almost always fall along the lines of "Miracles are not possible, so something else happened." vs "Miracles are totally possible so therefore it's the most likely explanation.

If miracles are possible then the resurrection IS the most likely possibility.  If they are not then even an crazy and insanely unlikely other possibility is still more possible than something that is impossible.

So, while it's pretty much crazy to believe that Jesus' body would have been stolen given so much evidence that it was not, it's still far less crazy than 'back from the dead' because 'back from the dead' is 100% impossible in the minds of some.

It's why the big debates that I used to support between guys like William Lane Craig (Christian Apologist) vs random philosopher, were pretty much a waste of time, because you have two people arguing from completely opposite views of reality who come at the issue totally differently and simply will not agree on what is possible.

I'm in a bind as to how to respond here, not in terms of content, but in terms of format. There are a number of isolated points in your post, and the temptation is to break it out into blocks and respond to each individually. But I've found in the past that such fragmented responses cause more fragmented responses, and lead to one-line responses which encourage nitpicking rather than understanding. After several levels of nested replies, everyone loses track of where the conversation started and no conclusions are reached.

How would you like me to reply to the above post? Should I pick one point to reply to, or start multiple topics for each issue raised above? Personally, I would rather we followed one point to exhaustion rather than trying to discuss multiple things at once.

One point at a time is fine.  Probably the easiest way to respond for sure. :)

I don't find either of these beliefs to be crazy. So long as one is able to distinguish between what they know (what is supported by the evidence) and what they believe (what is not supported by the evidence), and so long as one limits beliefs to what does not contradict the evidence, then I see no reason to call either person or either belief crazy.

There is a lot we don't know. Beliefs are intuitions and guesses that fill in some of what we don't know, to help us deal with the world around us. So long as these beliefs help us to lead better lives, and so long as we continue to seek to improve our knowledge and our beliefs, we can be considered sane.

Fair enough.  Crazy was perhaps the wrong word choice.  My main point here was that something that is incredibly unlikely (let's say 1 in a trillion - the body being stolen) is still infinitely more probable than something that is impossible (0 chance - the resurrection).

I agree that one does not need to be actually insane to believe either option.

People put their faith in science sometimes.  At one point in history, science told people the earth was flat, at others that the earth was the center of the universe.  And at others, Newton's laws were considered absolute--then along comes quantum theory.  People thought time was a constant, never to be changed in any way, and then comes Einstein and the time-space continuum and e=mc².  Einstein himself believed that black holes were theoretical only and could not exist in reality.

So "impossible" to me has no meaning as a general term.  It can only be impossible as to current scientific understanding, but until science is absolutely understood in its entirety, I draw no more comfort from those whose conclusions about the "impossible" come from science as those who blindly profess faith through religion that something is "absolute."  Two sides of the same coin.

If ever there is any evidence that resurrection from the dead could be possible then the nature of the whole discussion changes.  Until such time resurrection is only one of an infinite number of equally implausible theories (such as spontaneous combustion of dirt into a creature that looks like Jesus, or alien nanotechnology that created a Jesus look-alike to fool people), that all have an equal amount of zero evidence.

You're right, in theory he could have come back from the dead. Or in theory every single person in the region could have been infected with an eye parasite that caused mass hallucinations but left no trace in the victim's eyes.  Both of those "theories" have equal evidence to them - which is none.

An evidence based view of the situation simply can't include such scenarios as part of the possibilities.  However, for someone who is open to believing absolutely anything as a possibility, then absolutely anything can be considered.  Therein lies the difference between the two views and why it's pretty much impossible for the two sides to make sense of each other.

This is sort of one of my pet peeves, when religious people claim that believing a scientific finding is no different from having faith in a religion.  The differences are big, and are important.  Scientific findings can be wrong, but the important issue is that they are based on evidence.  Religious faith is specifically belief about things when there isn't sufficient evidence to support it.  Treating the two beliefs as "faith" obscures the very important difference between them (and that, I think, is what people are trying to do when they make such arguments).

Religion and science are not "two sides of the same coin."  They are fundamentally different in many ways.  While people can have unwarranted confidence in either one, that does not make them the same thing.  Key differences include:
1.  The fact that science considers evidence critical, whereas religious people tend to view the belief without evidence as as a positive thing.
2.  The fact that science encourages the challenge of previous results, and has repeatedly changed out view of reality as new evidence has come to light, whereas religions tend to view their beliefs as perfect and unchanging, and thus not open to the possibility of overturning.  Put another way, scientists consider finding out that we've been wrong about something very exciting and positive, whereas religions view the prospect of finding out that they've been wrong as one of the worst things imaginable.


To say "impossible" has no meaning is a bit silly, in my view.  I get what you're trying to say, but I'm sure even you don't believe absolutely anything anyone ever tells you just because it's possible it's true.  But I think this is illustrating Doulos' point pretty well.  Someone who thinks scientific claims are no different from religious claims "because, hey, either could be wrong, right?" is going to react very differently to extraordinary claims than someone who thinks some things are so unlikely that we should consider them impossible until we have extraordinary evidence in favor of them.

Finally, "science" never said that the earth was flat, and it's borderline to say it said the earth was the center of the universe.  The first was a pre-scientific view, and the latter was over turned about the time that what could really be called "science" started to be practiced (in the west, at least).  Not that that's a huge issue for the discussion here, but I think it's important to distinguish between "scientific findings" and "what people believed" and not use the interchangably.

There are different types of evidence, including logic.

Logically speaking, our understanding of the universe is finite, and our understanding of what is outside the universe is practically nil.  So we are like characters in a video game.  We follow the code programmed into the game, but we can never see what someone outside the code (the player or god or what have you) can or cannot do.  We do, however, know the practically boundless nature of the multiverse and the fact that there are many dimensions of existence, some that we do not perceive but that have been proven.  It is therefore more logical in an infinite multiverse with multiple dimensions to argue that something "is" possible than that it is "not" possible.  So logic leads us to the inevitable conclusion that a resurrection is more likely than not in the infinite layers of possibility.

You seem to discount this notion.  However, your argument is based on a proclaimed lack of evidence.  But there is evidence that makes the argument carry merit beyond mere speculation.

For example, another type of evidence is witness testimony.  Jesus showed himself to many, including a crowd of 500...AFTER his resurrection.  He stayed with the people to teach them new things for 40 days.  Therefore, we have witnesses as "evidence."

This does not count the witnesses who saw Lazarus raised from the dead or any other events where the dead have risen or witnesses have testified that they have seen resurrected dead beings (of which there are many, many accounts).

So witness testimony also lends itself to the fact that a resurrection (or at least life beyond death) is more probably than not.

When you say there is "no" evidence, I have to flatly deny that.  Is it the evidence you were looking for?  Maybe not.  But evidence there is...and it is there in spades.

We could go into other types of evidence based on our limited ability to measure things, but that might go into things like ghost investigations or what have you.  Whether those evidences are definitive proof or not, or if they suffer from some sort of defect, is not really the issue.  The fact is that there is evidence of some sort there of life after death, and to state there is "no" evidence means you would have to debunk each and every piece of evidence there is.

So ultimately, I go back to my original statement that it is people putting "faith" in our limited science and discounting evidence they do not believe.

But the only evidence of this witness testimony is found within the book that also claims of a resurrection.  This is a big problem.

Anyways, this discussion has proved my point that those who choose to believe in miracles (of which I used to be a part of) and those who do not (of which I now am a part of) simply view reality differently (not crazy, not bad, not evil...just differently) and thus cannot even discuss this topic on the same level.