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Trooth · 09-27-2007, 07:43 AM

The Bible can be used to "see if it is mentioned" as a sort of historical corroberation. After all, as per Noah's Ark, so many cultures or myths of a great flood exist (such as Atlantis) that it was clearly a powerful image for the times. However we have to accept that the world was much smaller "back then" in terms of known expanse so a big flood could easily be thought to have flooded the "world as they knew it". Of course we are dealing with an monotheism with an omnipotent God so marketing and exaggeration are also a factor.

Consequently you have to take it as metaphor and alegory and thus you have to accept that everything is open to interpretation and thus flawed as some sort of "life guide". You can't go around using it is as proof of world history because of the nature of it's assembly. The Bible is a "collected works" of third party writings and has gone through many, numerous and grievous editing and translations all of which have carried some sort of overt or hidden agenda.

This is where the current arguments are breaking down. Certain arms of Christianity feel threatened because they have chosen (they chose remember) to take the Bible literally and yet parts of it are patent bunk - the Earth is not flat nor immobile for example. The fact that some scholar chose to deduce the age of the Earth from the Bible (remember it doesn't say on page one that "In the beginning which was about 6000 years ago, at roughly 2pm on a Sunday lunchtime") was up to him and it is up to those that follow him. Creationists refer to, for example, evolution as the "theory of evolution" - quite correctly as it happens - but they also need to refer to creationism as "The theory of assumptive deduction of creationism" but of course they don't.

The other part of this debate i mentioned earlier about adding mist to smoke is that because some people have chosen to take the Bible literally and declare it not a collected works of stories but an Encyclopedia of world history, then it has become EDIT: self: -proving.

Let's take a religious style argument and apply it to a Dictionary and the spelling of the word Metre (SI unit of distance).

I spell it metre, no doubt my American friends on this board will spell it meter.

To back up my spelling i will look in my dictionary and it confirms it - metre. My American friends might do the same and they assert meter.

At this point i might take a rational argument, look up the derivation of the word, it's history, that it is French and "re" is a typical French construct and "er" is not, gather together a load of evidence to present to my friends. My opposition, we shall say, has taken the Biblical
"proof" and thus searched further through their dictionary to find that centimeter, millimeter, kilometer are all spelled "er" and therefore this "proves" that "er" is the correct spelling!

09-27-2007, 07:43 AM	#190 (permalink)
Trooth *Senior Contributor* Join Date: 11-23-03 Posts: 2,110 Country:	The Bible can be used to "see if it is mentioned" as a sort of historical corroberation. After all, as per Noah's Ark, so many cultures or myths of a great flood exist (such as Atlantis) that it was clearly a powerful image for the times. However we have to accept that the world was much smaller "back then" in terms of known expanse so a big flood could easily be thought to have flooded the "world as they knew it". Of course we are dealing with an monotheism with an omnipotent God so marketing and exaggeration are also a factor. Consequently you have to take it as metaphor and alegory and thus you have to accept that everything is open to interpretation and thus flawed as some sort of "life guide". You can't go around using it is as proof of world history because of the nature of it's assembly. The Bible is a "collected works" of third party writings and has gone through many, numerous and grievous editing and translations all of which have carried some sort of overt or hidden agenda. This is where the current arguments are breaking down. Certain arms of Christianity feel threatened because they have chosen (they chose remember) to take the Bible literally and yet parts of it are patent bunk - the Earth is not flat nor immobile for example. The fact that some scholar chose to deduce the age of the Earth from the Bible (remember it doesn't say on page one that "In the beginning which was about 6000 years ago, at roughly 2pm on a Sunday lunchtime") was up to him and it is up to those that follow him. Creationists refer to, for example, evolution as the "theory of evolution" - quite correctly as it happens - but they also need to refer to creationism as "The theory of assumptive deduction of creationism" but of course they don't. The other part of this debate i mentioned earlier about adding mist to smoke is that because some people have chosen to take the Bible literally and declare it not a collected works of stories but an Encyclopedia of world history, then it has become EDIT: self: -proving. Let's take a religious style argument and apply it to a Dictionary and the spelling of the word Metre (SI unit of distance). I spell it metre, no doubt my American friends on this board will spell it meter. To back up my spelling i will look in my dictionary and it confirms it - metre. My American friends might do the same and they assert meter. At this point i might take a rational argument, look up the derivation of the word, it's history, that it is French and "re" is a typical French construct and "er" is not, gather together a load of evidence to present to my friends. My opposition, we shall say, has taken the Biblical "proof" and thus searched further through their dictionary to find that centimeter, millimeter, kilometer are all spelled "er" and therefore this "proves" that "er" is the correct spelling! __________________ The world as it should be at surrealscoop.blogspot.com Last edited by Trooth : 09-27-2007 at 07:49 AM.