HistoricalDavid

How well do you want us to know it? I am at UCL right now doing English literature. It's the 25th best university in the world. Normally I wouldn't boast like this but you're specifically going down the ad hominem route, so here are my credentials. Take them or leave them. Logically this is irrelevant posturing from me but I am trying to satisfy you.

I am systematically reading the King James Bible. And I mean reading it. I do not mean reading the juicy bits in Sunday School or the Verse of the Day on BibleGateway.com, like morons who quote verses and expect intellectual credit for it. I've almost finished Genesis, and I'm going slowly because I'm constantly distracted by drinking parties in my hall of residence, World in Conflict and real, insightful literature - i.e. not the Bible.

a) I suppose I've been spoilt by Shakespeare, Pope, Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth et al because I find the language so far sickeningly bad. Compare such phrases as "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," "In what distant deeps or skies, Burnt the fire of thine eyes," "O'er the files and musters of war," "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, What mighty contests rise, from trivial things," with those from the Bible. Taking the last quote I provided, Alexander Pope effortlessly sustains this unbelievable lyricism throughout the entire 1,000-line Rape of the Lock; finding bad poetry there is a losing proposition. Same for Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra. Where is the competent language in the Bible? The Book of Job so far appears like an island of beautiful poetry in a sea of unintelligible nonsense, and of course in that God reveals himself to be spine-chillingly cruel. It's the same feeling I got when Lot offers his daughters up for gang rape; it's easily the most offensive mainstream art, i.e. not Nazi literature or somesuch, I've ever experienced.

No, Arnold123, I am not interested in disputing the factual accuracy of Genesis chapter 5, more because I fall asleep from boredom rather than the utter nonsense of the Bible listing a bunch of men living 900-year-long lives...

You know how primary ('elementary' in American English) school children use too many 'thens' and 'ands' in their speech and writing? And this happened and that happened... Someone should've told the King James writers to attend primary school, because they can't write for sh-t.

Yes, I admit that was a rant about the bad language of the KJV Bible and not about its accuracy. I have been corrupted by real literature. It was written at the same time as Shakespeare and well after Chaucer so it doesn't have an excuse for being so bad due to chronology.

b) Okay, so let's discuss factual accuracy. Let's take a look at the very beginning.

BibleGateway.com - Passage Lookup: Genesis;

1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And so on. Notice the jarring repetition of 'upon the face', as if the KJV writers had limited vocabulary.

What 'facts' are there to debate? It is a series of statements. Let's look at the scientific train of thought. "We see celestial objects receding away from us at velocity proportional to their distance. We also see microwave background radiation everywhere. A good explanation for this is that there was a Big Bang giving celestial objects the observed outward velocity, and also creating hot conditions producing gamma radiation which got redshifted into the CMBR we see today."

Bible: (I quote) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

So it's left to modern-day creationists and Intelligent Design advocates to fill in the blanks, and in one respect the KJV Bible helps them by being so vague and wishy-washy. But I refuse to debate the factual accuracy of the Bible when there is no real meat in it to bite into. Now as for modern-day creationist pseudoscience... bring up the points, if you like. I suppose the "thermodynamics/evolution" conflict, "Darwinism promotes racism", "There must be a first cause..." and "747 from scrap metal" will be thrown at me...

Arnold123

Excellent HISTORICALDAVID would you like to act as the reference?

JAD_333

Naw... What does accuracy mean to you: Properly translated words? Or that the God as described in the texts exists? The original idea of the thread was aimed at the former with, of course, many other facets covered, e.g., suppressed and newly discovered texts, church politics, etc. But as to the narrower issues concerning the existence of God, Jesus' lifestory, and the essential message to us, proving the bible's accuracy is near impossible. But as the ultimate parable in the gospels, the life of Jesus, tries to convey to us, it is possible. Some other thread, maybe...

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Trooth

I have skipped loads of stuff. However i thought i would jump in as people who have read my rambling over the years know i am keen to do.

If we are on the subject of accuracy, that pre-supposes that we are taking the Bible literally. So if we are to use it for the details of events and timings we can't allow the interpretation of "it's a metaphor in". Personally I am much more open to discussions about the metaphorical, algorical teaching nature of the bible.

However, for accuracy. We are told that a man lived in a desert and was given some inside information from God, to whit he commenced building a large boat. Very, very large boat. Not only that but he travelled thousands of miles (off the edges of the known world at that time) to collect two of every animal. As you can imagine the man laboured hard to fit this in one lifetime.

He managed, for example, to travel all the way from middle eastern desert to frozen pole to retrieve two white bears and managed to get said creatures back unharmed to the desert. Not only that but he managed to put them on the boat and stop them from eating the other animals (unless of course he, say, took dozens of sheep for the carnivores but kept two lucky ones aside).

This man who achieved in a short time what several men failed to achieve over the coming millenia : he crossed seas people did not know where there, survived extremes of temperatures that killed better prepared men, tamed the wildest animals for example and had advanced ship building skills.

And yet he was a failure. He forgot one of the favourite animals of the bible, he forgot the bloody unicorn.

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Tarek Morgen

actually the unicorn exist only in the king james version.

glyn

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glyn

[quote=Trooth;410420]And yet he was a failure. He forgot one of the favourite animals of the bible, he forgot the bloody unicorn.

Damn shame that. How forgetful was he? Are there other species that perished because of his bad memory?

HistoricalDavid

I am quite drunk right now, and I accidentally deleted my message. Nevertheless, I shall valiantly endeavour to recite it. Now I shall ctrl+A and ctrl+C all my text.

Arnold123, was that an attempt at sarcasm? If so, it fell flat on its face. I am drunk and you are presumably sober; yet your intellectual vapidity is evident simply by the fact that I did not claim to be an authority, nor have pretensions to be, (other than to appease your own stupid nonsense of "you have to know the bible in order to refute it", like, as someone said but I am too drunk to remember, you have to have a degree in leprachaunology to refute leprachauns.) so your sarcasm is a little off-the-mark. If it wasn't sarcasm, well...


If you wish to debate the intellectual meat of my post then please do, and I shall post when I am less inebriated. In the meantime, I still stand by my reasoning that that the Bible is not only inaccurate but morally offensive in its repression of female sexuality.

I often mistyped but I corrected it afterwards. I get props for being so linguistically correct even when drunk. Come on, give em to me.

Tarek Morgen

mh...how did actually fresh water fish survive the flood? if everything was one big ocean back then, where did they go? Had the ark a huge aquarium?

glyn

Tarek Morgen

and how did Africans become black, asian small, and irish red-haried in just a few thousands years (when all existing people descent from those fwe survivors).

Trooth

Yes, and that in itself tells you a lot about the credibility of the Bible ... it has versions.

EDIT : And indeed, even within an instance there are versions such as the versions of the ten commandments.

Trooth

On another approach to this problem of the reliability of myths. Let's take an extremely brief example of how we approach evidence concerning aspects of the lives of two men, both of whom almost certainly existed in the corporeal forms that we acknowledge today and at similar historical times. Jesus Christ ("Son of God") and Qin Shi Huang (First Emperor of China)

There was, almost certainly, a son of a carpenter circa 2040 years ago in the middle east called Jesus, just as there was very definitely the first emperor of China.

Now, the comparison I think is interesting is how we approach stories about these two men, how both the rational and relgious mind approaches things.

Qin's tomb is largely only known about through the work of Sima Qian who wrote about it less than a century after Qin popped his clogs. This compares with Christ, whose "historical" record was first documented about 70 years after he died.

Qin's tomb which has never been escavated, by Sima Qian, to be spectacular, with flowing lakes and rivers of mercury. However as yet it has not been excavated. As such the closest the rational world will come is to say that there are much higher mercury concentrations in the area of the tomb than normal. In other words we don't know if Sima Qian's description is accurate but here is what evidence we have.

Contrast that with the religious mind. There is no doubt that not only did Christ live, but that he was the Son of God, performed the miracles mentioned and then ascended to heavan. There isn't evidence but that only makes the events more "real".

The rational world does not condemn or prejudice against people who believe in Sima Qian's writings, or who dismiss them. The religious world has poured violence and vitriol on people who do not believe the words in their "history" and have used said "history" to justify their actions.

At this point you have to accept that this is simply a debate or a discussion that cannot realistically take place. Rational and religious people simply cannot communicate at the level required to analyse the "historical" accuracy of the Bible, because ultimately the rational person will want to question the Bible and the religious person will use one part of the Bible as evidence to prove another part - mixing smoke and mist.

leib10

Good God, how many times does this debate have to come up?

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HistoricalDavid

Status: really drunk. Vodka, Jack Daniel's....

The pseudoscientific response would be that God created the world that way. Quite why, nobody knows - God is a blank check DRUNK EDIT: CHEQUE, you can change His ways to any purpose you wish. Since there is no verifiable evidence as to what He says, Osama can invoke Him as many times as he likes, as can George W.; I am tremendously drunk right now, but I do remember George Bush claiming divine justification for the invasion of Iraq,

As many times as it is necessary to educate those who do not know, my dear boy. Yes, I do turn into a wannabe Dostoevsky/Austen when drunk. I don't know whether you are familiar with such real literature, Arnold123, but I recommend it nonetheless.