The Bible

[betsy]

You didn't actually deal with his point.

He didn't actually deal with the posted fact.

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE!

His "point" is pointless in this posted fact.

That ancient holy texts may contain some actual places or events is beyond question. For instance, the Hindu Vedas have been used in recent decades to get a glimpse at the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Europeans who moved into Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. Along with ancient Zoroastrian writings, they give us at least some window on this important group of Indo-European peoples; their culture, their society, their governing structure, and even some hints at how they arrived there. But I doubt you'll find many Indo-European scholars who are going to advocate for the existence of Vishnu or any of the other members of the Hindu pantheon.

And as I've explained to him, the posted fact is just stating a simple fact. That is, so far, no archeological findings contradict any Biblical references.

The fact is not claiming archeological findings are proving the existence of God.

His response was off-key.

Such books have their uses, to be sure, and can give us an idea, directly or indirectly, of the people that wrote them or followed the religious practices espoused in them, but to declare them historical texts is quite another thing entirely.

Your statement seems to contradict itself.

Generally speaking, if a book gives us an idea (directly or indirectly) of the people of the time, their practices (whether religious or not), their customs/traditions, and these are verified by science.....surely they are useful as historical texts.

Let me just use your own exmple:

ToadBrother wrote:

For instance, the Hindu Vedas have been used in recent decades to get a glimpse at the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Europeans who moved into Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. Along with ancient Zoroastrian writings, they give us at least some window on this important group of Indo-European peoples; their culture, their society, their governing structure, and even some hints at how they arrived there.

Isn't that history right there?

So it's history in such a way that they give us a look into how things were during that time - verified to be true by science.

Of course since science shies away from dealing with anything supernatural....we cannot accept the parts about the existence of their dieties - whether they exists or not.

But it does gives us a glimpse about what gods/dieties they worship, and/or how they go about their worship during those days. Therefore, yes they are historical records.

Edited June 21, 2011 by betsy

[DogOnPorch]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer

And thanks for the reply DoP. I do recall now learning a bit about him.

Virgil was, more or less, Pt II of the Trojan War.

[g_bambino]

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE!

Archaeology has proven that no global flood wiped out human (and all other) life all over the planet, all at once.

[M.Dancer]

Virgil was, more or less, Pt II of the Trojan War.

More less than more...written 800 years later, more concerned with flattering Augustus than anything else.

[M.Dancer]

He didn't actually deal with the posted fact.

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE!

Archaeology has proven that Abraham did no go to Egypt with camels.

[DogOnPorch]

More less than more...written 800 years later, more concerned with flattering Augustus than anything else.

Yup...a Roman Imperialist tidbit.

[ToadBrother]

He didn't actually deal with the posted fact.

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE!

His "point" is pointless in this posted fact.

How about the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of the Israelite captivity in Egypt or of a wandering through the Sinai Peninsula for forty years. There's no evidence that the sun stood still, either, which you think Babylonian and Chinese astrologers, who spent most of their time watching the skies, would have noticed.

The Bible is a mythical history, with some factual or semi-factual accounts, just like Homer, the Vedas and so forth.

[ToadBrother]

Generally speaking, if a book gives us an idea (directly or indirectly) of the people of the time, their practices (whether religious or not), their customs/traditions, and these are verified by science.....surely they are useful as historical texts.

Except that they're not historical texts. They may preserve certain facts, but often in highly distorted form. You can't just map one to one a claim from ancient text to an actual historical event. Take the king lists of Sumer and Egypt. While a fair chunk of those lists is likely factual, when you get to proto-literate and pre-literate kings, it becomes a lot iffier to claim that those kings ever existed. Such texts are highly unreliable, just like the Biblical texts. Some parts may be true, some parts may be partly true, some parts are probably just pure fancy.

I'll give you a more recent example. I have a book on the various Anglo-Saxon kings of the Heptarchy from the 6th to 9th centuries AD. There are genealogies of the Kings of Wessex (the founding line of the later kings of England and ultimately of the United Kingdom) that trail off into semi-mythical kings of dubious existence, one that includes Odin as an ancestor. That, of course, was standard practice, a sort of proto-divine right claim whereby if a royal line could claim a god somewhere in its lineage, it gave that line greater stature and greater right to rule (you can see whispers of that in Arthur and Excalibur, for instance). Does this make the entire list of Wessex kings false? Nope. What it does mean is that for early kings for which little or no other evidence exists, you cannot make the claim that those kings actually existed. That's where the notion of a "legendary" or "semi-mythical" king comes from.

[Oleg Bach]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdboGJqdDb4

A couple of fish had retard baby...

Never like that graph - the one with the monkey walking a little more upright and then in the final stages of supposed evolutionary developement becomes fully human - I am not decended from an ape - I may be related to all live forms but I have always been me...and never a monkey.

[DogOnPorch]

Never like that graph - the one with the monkey walking a little more upright and then in the final stages of supposed evolutionary developement becomes fully human - I am not decended from an ape - I may be related to all live forms but I have always been me...and never a monkey.

Then you and Ms Garrison agree.

[ToadBrother]

Never like that graph - the one with the monkey walking a little more upright and then in the final stages of supposed evolutionary developement becomes fully human - I am not decended from an ape - I may be related to all live forms but I have always been me...and never a monkey.

What else would you call us on rather than apes? We sit within a clad whose nearest relatives are all apes. Our ancestors sit within that clad, and certainly were apes. I don't understand this allergy to being called an ape.

[betsy]

Frog princes and apes, or monkeys or birds....

If you're going to refute....refute this posted fact!

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE.

You're trying to bring refutations to things that are not being presented as arguments!

It's like, the mosquito sits on your nose and yet you're trying to swat the flies that are flying about, and proudly yelling "well I'm going for the fly!"

Never mind aiming for things behind or on the far sides. Aim for bulls-eye!

Edited June 22, 2011 by betsy

[BubberMiley]

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE.

It's wonderful to see you forsaking the blasphemers who say God is incapable of creating an evolutionary world and have come to accept God in his true glory.

[g_bambino]

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE.

Maybe you only see what's in 200% font. So, let's try it this way:

Archaeology has proven that no global flood wiped out human (and all other) life all over the planet, all at once.

Archaeology has proven that Abraham did no go to Egypt with camels.

How about the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of the Israelite captivity in Egypt or of a wandering through the Sinai Peninsula for forty years.

DID YOU GET THAT?

[M.Dancer]

Frog princes and apes, or monkeys or birds....

If you're going to refute....refute this posted fact!

FACT: NO ARCHEOLOGICAL DISCOVERY HAS CONTRADICTED A BIBLICAL REFERENCE.

It's been done a few times in this thread already. ADD?

[betsy]

Maybe you only see what's in 200% font. So, let's try it this way:

DID YOU GET THAT?

CITE!

If you feel so confident and sure....then support your claims! Just the way I supported all my claims!

[g_bambino]

If you feel so confident and sure....then support your claims! Just the way I supported all my claims!

Ah, so at least you've read our words, finally. (Do you have some vision issues that require fonts to be huge?)

I do support my claim, dear. Archaeology has uncovered no evidence of human civilization and life around the planet being wiped out all at once. Had the Biblcal flood actually taken place, there would be evidence from China to Mexico, in Egypt, India, and France, of towns and cities having been demolished and the people in them killed, all at around the same date. And that's just looking at it from an archaeological standpoint: Physically, there is a finite amount of water on the planet, which is not even close enough to cover all the landmass. Genetically, our DNA tells us we don't all descend from a Hebrew man who fathered our ancestors at the age of 600.

The scientific process determines what is true by collecting evidence in support of a theory; once enough evidence is found, the theory can be considered a fact. A global flood would leave behind it many, many marks - smaller floods do. Yet, there's no evidence - not one shred - that the world was flooded the way the Bible tells it. With a total vacuume of proof, it can be concluded that the Bible's story is a myth.

Even some sane Christians accept this:

When for the past two centuries thousands of geologists from around the world, including numerous Bible-believing Christians, insist from a lifetime of experience in looking at fossiliferous rocks that those rocks are extremely old and had nothing to do with a global deluge, then the church must listen. Commentators who dismiss or disparage that body of geological knowledge solely on the grounds of their commitment to a principle of interpretation might do well to question their commitment to truth in a larger sense....

Just what are those extrabiblical data? In summary, several centuries of effort to locate physical remnants of the biblical deluge have completely failed. Any physical evidence that has been claimed to support a global flood has eventually been demonstrated to have a different explanation. The idea that the flood deposited the world's stratified rocks has been thoroughly discredited by numerous lines of evidence. Many of the individual strata give evidence of having been deposited in such non-flood environments as rivers, beaches, deltas, lakes, glaciers, deserts, and shallow oceanic platforms. Many strata, such as lake deposits and fossil reefs, contain abundant indicators of very slow deposition under environmentally sensitive conditions quite incompatible with a catastrophic deluge. Many strata are overlain by fossil soils and separated from higher strata by erosional breaks that could only have been produced over extensive lengths of time. The fossils themselves are arrayed in progressive order in the geologic column. Many of the organisms lived in environments utterly unlike flooded terrains. Radiometric dating of volcanic ash or lava flows interbedded with fossiliferous strata show that they are millions of years old. Some large masses of igneous rocks injected into the strata took hundreds of thousands of years to cool and crystallize. Many fossiliferous rocks have been metamorphosed, indicating extreme burial that could not possibly have occurred during a year-long deluge.

All the evidence of the rocks tells us that they were not produced or arranged by a flood. The views of earth history offered by Woodward, Catcott, G.M. Price, Whitcomb and Morris, and John R. Rice are simply and obviously incorrect.

The evidence is also arrayed against views that confine the action of the flood to the globe's surface features. Most of the gravels, sands, boulders, smoothed U-shaped valleys, and surface grooves and scratches have been amply demonstrated to be the result of continental ice sheets rather than a flood. We now know that the frozen mammoths and their friends did not perish in a major catastrophe only a few thousand years ago involving a radical climatic change. These animals were well adapted to life on the harsh tundra and died individually over a period of thousands of years in accidents that were catastrophic only to them. The rubble-drift deposits of southern England and the Mediterranean (and scarcely evident at all in the Middle East) are most likely the result of downslope soil movements during the ice age. The views of the deluge propounded by Buckland, Sedgwick, Prestwich, and Wright are also incorrect.

In addition to the wealth of geological evidence opposing the possibility of a global deluge, a variety of biogeographical evidence also counts conclusively against such an event. For one thing, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that human or animal populations were ever disrupted by a catastrophic global flood at any point in the past. Indeed, all the evidence indicates continuous occupation by these populations of points around the globe into the exceedingly distant past. Human beings have been in North America for at least twelve thousand years and in Australia for at least thirty or forty thousand years, long before the biblical deluge could have occurred by any consistent reading of the textual evidence of the Bible.

Furthermore, a literal reading of the flood narrative requires us to presume that representatives of tens of thousands of different species left their natural habitats and restricted supplies of food, made their way from all the distant and isolated parts of the globe, crossing oceans, arctic wastes, and any number of hostile environments to arrive at the ark, that these vast numbers of creatures somehow all boarded the craft, which (presumably) already held enough food to sustain them for a year, and then after the retreat of the floodwaters all made the journey back to their respective habitats to replenish the earth. Commentators who maintain that fossils were laid down in the flood must apparently also assume that representatives of all the species in the fossil record, including dozens of species of dinosaurs, were also aboard the ark. Is a literal reading of the flood narrative really so sacrosanct as to induce us to entertain such bizarre scenarios?

History of the Collapse of "Flood Geology" and a Young Earth

[c/e]

Edited June 23, 2011 by g_bambino

[cybercoma]

Eagerly awaits the dismissive response with several faces and 100pt bold font.

Edited June 23, 2011 by cybercoma

[Oleg Bach]

Then you and Ms Garrison agree.

I don't think it is worth the effort to reach over and click on the amplifier and run those big GBL speakers to listen to Ms Garraisons video. All I know is all life on earth is sacred. That all life is related to each other in the fact that all things that are alive are generated by the same life force....also all I know is that a tree is not a man...a cherry is not an apple and an ape may have the same lateral structure of arms and legs...but said ape is not my ancestor any more than that fish who's fins appear to me hands like mine.

[cybercoma]

The ape is not your ancestor. The ape's ancestor, however, is also your ancestor.

Edited June 23, 2011 by cybercoma

[ToadBrother]

Maybe you only see what's in 200% font. So, let's try it this way:

DID YOU GET THAT?

What I got is that you think if you keep repeating a lie loudly enough that it somehow magically becomes true. Not sure how that squares with your religious beliefs or moral imperatives, but I guess that's between you and your particular deity.

[ToadBrother]

The ape is not your ancestor. The ape's ancestor, however, is also your ancestor.

I'm not sure what you would call the common ancestor of all the Great Apes (of which we are one) anything other than ape. I realize this is a classification debate that goes on and on and on, but if the common ancestor was ape-like (which it was), it's descendants are apes (which we, gorillas, chimps and orangs are), then I don't see the issue with saying we evolved from apes.

[g_bambino]

What I got is that you think if you keep repeating a lie loudly enough that it somehow magically becomes true. Not sure how that squares with your religious beliefs or moral imperatives, but I guess that's between you and your particular deity.

I assume you meant to direct that at betsy, not me...?

[M.Dancer]

... it's descendants are apes (which we, gorillas, chimps and orangs are), then I don't see the issue with saying we evolved from apes.

It's a semantic issue...

[ToadBrother]

I assume you meant to direct that at betsy, not me...?

Sorry, yes...