proof that fundy god doesn't exist. please correct me if i'm wrong

[banjosareunderrated]

fundies of all stripes have been disproven so many times it's almost a joke by now. but "those of faith" still hold that noah probably didn't build that ark but the bulk of the bible is still accurate. for those that still hold on to this biblical fairy tale, please explain this fundamental flaw from the opening chapter.

genesis says that man was made in god's image and that eve, or females, were created afterwards. as trite as it sounds, why, then, did adam have nipples?

Don't all embryos develop female characteristics until hormones steer some toward masculinity? If so, doesn't that mean eve would've been created first considering all human embryos default to the feminine? So, if there were a creator, she would be female? Therefore, the entire intro to a book that supposedly holds "the truth" is flat out lying from the start? Even if you think said book is a collection of similies and metaphors for a just life, doesn't the fact that the opening chapter is an out and out lie discredit everything afterward?

I'm not trying to be trite or to belittle someone's faith, but it's an honest question that i've been thinking about for a while. Especially for the "i'm not a xtian right, but i believe in the bible" crowd.

Why would Jesus, a male, be chosen as the messiah? 70% of humans are female. If God wanted a human rep., wouldn't he pick the side that had the most representation? Even if he didn't care, Jesus would've been all-knowing which means he would've known that, even though he was born of a virgin, he still had nipples, which means that like all humans and most mammals, he was a female in his embryonic state until certain chromosomes kicked in, but, still, he told folks he was the son of god... but that was a lie because until his 2nd month of gestation, he was the daughter of god.

I'm very confused.

[madeline_con]

1. "... why, then, did adam have nipples? "

How do you know he did?

[banjosareunderrated]

3. because man was made in his image. i'm a man. i have nipples.

[madeline_con]

8. I'm sorry, but

that's a lame argument. Just because you have nipples, doesn't mean every man has them.

[banjosareunderrated]

35. just because i'm a man doesn't mean man exists.

nipples, and, or, the lack thereof, sooooooo take a backseat to that. :D

[PsychoDad]

2. hold that noah probably didn't build that ark

Where did you get that? Fundamentalists still believe in the literal interpretation of a global flood, along with a 6 day creation 6000 or so years ago.

[banjosareunderrated]

4. Please. God said let there be light first. then he made the sun. after.

[PsychoDad]

7. Although not a fundy myself, nor christian.

You have to admit...

In the current cosmological theory, just after the big bang, the young hot universe was full of photons and other high energy particles (light) which spurred the expansion of the universe before the formation of the hydrogen which coalesced into stars and galaxies.

Although it seems ludicrous and anti intuitive on the surface, the bible did get the order of light before sun right.

[DemBones DemBones]

12. Will you please tell me how Muslims view the Bible?

I know that Abraham is a patriarch and important figure to Muslims as well as Jews and, of course, Christians, Christianity being based on Judaic tradition and belief, including what we Christians call the Old Testament.

I also know that Jesus is regarded as a prophet (a great prophet?) by Muslims and that Mary, his mother, is greatly respected in Islam as well, so Muslims are obviously familiar with the stories of the New Testament.

And I know that Mohammed is regarded as The Prophet. "There is one God, Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet, " are the words, if I'm correct.

To start with, is what I know correct, from a Muslim point of view? Or have I been misled on anything? (And how do Muslims spell the name of The Prophet? I used two different spelling above and neither may be the preferred one.)

Secondly, how do Muslims view the Bible? Is it ever read by anyone other than Islamic scholars? (That's assuming they read it, which may be wrong.)

It's add that I learned less in school about Islam than I did about any other major religion. I learned more about the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks,Romans, and even the Norse and Etruscand, though that may be due solely to the excellent teaching of a couple of teachers, notably the man who was my sixth grade teacher in Jacksonville, Florida. In college I was required to read with an open mind the Bhagavad Gita, Analects of Confucius, various books of the Bible, Tao of Lao-tse, Epic of Gilgamesh (which I had read in high school; thanks to a world lit teacher), and lots more spiritual literature. But not the Koran (Q'aran???) Not Rumi. I suppose this all goes back to the Crusades.

In recent years, I've lamented knowing so very little about Islam (and so much about Osama bin Laden, interesting person though he is.) Can you recommend a good online source for learning about the Muslim faith?

[PsychoDad]

27. You're pretty much on the money.

Wow... Where to start? :)

Firstly, a note about Arabic. According to the encyclopedia Brittanica, Arabic has one of the most complex word structures of any human language, making translation extremely difficult.

An Arabic word is often equivalent to an entire English sentence.
Each word in Arabic can have up to 10,000 inflections. There are close to 70 million legitimate words in Arabic and vowels in everyday Arabic are not written, resulting in a very high level of ambiguity. And, Arabic has a few letters that have no equivilent in english, and some that have a couple of possible translations, which are variously translated as a/', q/k, and d/z/th. Like Chinese there are a couple of conventions for translations used, so, Muhammad and Mohammed, Qur'an and Koran are all acceptable.

Also, Allah translates literaly as "The God", singular and without any bias of gender. We often use "he" because "it", which would be more correct, is so impersonal, but we could also refer to Allah as her just as correctly as he. So, "La Illaha Il Allah, anna Muhammadin rasool Allah" literally means "There is no god if not The One God, and Muhammad is the Messanger of The One God".

Yes, Islam recognizes the biblical prophets from Adam through Abraham and Moses, all the way to Jesus(peace be upon them). We accept the virgin birth of Jesus, called Isa in arabic, and view him as a very special prophet. What we do not agree upon is the divinity of Christ. We view all the biblical prophets as Islamic prophets. Muhammad was but the Seal (last} of the prophets. In addition to the biblical prophets, Islam also teaches that God sent prophets to all nations and peoples, to remind us of who God is, where we came from and of our Obligation to that God and to each other. That is why, according to Muslims, there are some basic underlying unity in all religions. Thus we belive in a Oneness of God, a Oneness of Humanity and a oneness of messengers and the Message.

Muslims see Islam as an evolution or continuation of the Religion of Abraham from Abraham through Judaism and Christanity and into Islam. Thus, from the viewpoint of Islam all three are really one, united under a single God.

Whew! Now to the main Question...

How do we view the bible?

Remember, we belive in the oneness of the message and the messengers, thus the message brought by Abraham, Moses and Jesus was in essence the same. ie: as Moses and Jesus said, "Hear, Oh Israel, The Lord your God is One God". And Jesus and Muhammad both taught tolerance, forgiveness and the need for social awareness and obligation as one of the most important facets of worship. Thus the Tarut (Torah), Zabur (psalms), Injeel (Gospel) and Quran (Recitation) are all the same message to humanity.

But does the bible accurately record the message.. or has it been altered or corrupted over time, either through mistake of translation or purposeful revision?

In the case of the Old Testament, we know that it was written over a long period of time from around 1500-500 B.C. in several different forms of Hebrew and some Aramaic. Little definite indication of who wrote what when. We can tell from writing styles in the hebrew that various writers worked on the Pentatuch, the five books of Moses, Genesis alone having maybe been hammered together from at least two differing stories by at least 3 differnt authors.

These scriptures were transmitted by Jewish scribes known as Massoretes, who took great care to make as an exact a copy as possible. The earliest extant copies we have date from about 900 B.C.

In the case of the New Testament, the earliest gospels were written around 90 A.D. or roughly 60 years after Jesus said and did the things related in them. The authors are unknown, although the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke probably came from a single source. The Gospel of John was even considered heretical by the fathers early church. The bulk of the New Testament contains letters from Paul, who never saw or heard Jesus, and appreantly had his disagrements with James, the brother of Jesus and Peter, who were the leaders of the church in Jerusalam and had sat at the feet of Jesus.

Then there is the question of who's bible we are talking about.

We are all famillier with the King James Bible, which when contrasted with extant copies of the older greek documents or when compaired the texts of Stephanus' 1550 Greek New Testament text and the United Bible Societies' 1993 Greek New Testament has many mistakes and short comings.

But there are other versions and whole cannons in use today, such as:

The Anglican Church. The canon of the Anglican Church falls between the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations by accepting only the Jewish canon and the New Testament as authoritative, but also by accepting segments of the apocryphal writings in the lectionary and liturgy.

The Armenian Church. The noteworthy features of the Armenian version of the Bible was the inclusion of certain books that elsewhere was regarded as apocryphal. The Old Testament included the History of Joseph and Asenath and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the New Testament included the Epistle of Corinthians to Paul and a Third Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians.

The Coptic Church. Athanasius issued his Thirty-Ninth Festal Epistle not only in the Greek but also in Coptic in a slightly different form, though the list of the twenty seven books of the New Testament is the same in both languages. How far, however the list remained authoritative for the Copts is problematical. The Coptic translation of the collection knowns as the Eighty-Five Apostlic Canons concludes with a different sequence of the books of the New Testament and is enlarged by the addition of two others: the four Gospels; the Acts of the Apostles; the fourteen Epistles of Paul (not mentioned individually); two Epistles of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude; the Apocalypse of John; the two Epistles of Clement.

The Ethiopian Church. This Church has the largest Bible of all, and and distinguishes different canons, the "narrower" and the "broader" according to the extent of the New Testament. The Ethiopic Old Testament comprises the books of the Hebrew Bible as well as all of the deuterocanonical books listed above, along with Jubilees, I Enoch, and Joseph ben Gorion's medieval history of the Jews and other nations. The New Testament in what is referred to as the "broader" canon is made up of thirty-five books, joining to the usual twenty-seven books eight additional texts, namely four sections of church order from a compilation called Sinodos, two sections from the Ethiopic Book of the Covenant, Ethiopic Clement, and Ethiopic Didascalia. When the "narrower" New Testament canon is followed, it is made up of only the familiar twenty-seven books, but then the Old Testament books are divided differently so that they make up 54 books instead of 46. In both the narrower and broader canon, the total number of books comes to 81.

Wow.. That's a lot of versions.

So, The question a muslim must ask is, even if the message was preserved, in which version? And which message is the real message?

For this Muslims must turn to the Quran.

2nd Timothy 3:16, in the bible, tells us “All Scripture is inspired by God..." To a Muslim, Inspired is the key word here. The scripture of the Bible was inspired, whereas the scripture of the Quran was dictated verbatum or recited to Muhammad from God through the angel Gabrael. There is only one version or cannon of the Quran, which was memorized and recorded from the begining, not multiples to choose from. The arabic of the oldest Quran is the same as the arabic of today's Quran. In addition to this, there are contempoary reports of Muhammad and his acts and sayings by those who knew him (these are known as Hadeeth} which have been documented as sound and authentic through tracking the sources to their origin.

So, in conclusion, we don't see the bible as right or wrong, but like precious metal traped in a base ore, as a book that contains the truth when examined in the light of the Quran.

Sorry if this is so long winded :) Your questions were excellent and each deserved a worthy response. Please remember I am not a scholar, thus if I am wrong in anything, please forgive me.

A good source for learning about Islam is :
http://www.islamonline.net/english/introducingislam/index.shtml

And peace be to you :)

[madeline_con]

9. "then he made the sun. after."

There are those who'll tell you the two descriptions of creation is one that's general and one that's more detailed, not that they necessarily happened in that order.

You're assuming you know far more about it than you do, IMO.

[dutchdoctor]

5. You have a strange logic

Why do you think 70% of humans are female?
Furthermore I don't think fundies will be swayed by the fact that all males have female characteristics at some point in their development, therefore they ARE females. I mean you do accept the fact that there is a difference between an adult male and an adult female right? Because these differences are (usually) not due to external circumstances, there also must be an intrinsic difference between male and female embryos.

Why did god pick a male? Because he is an invention made up by males, thats the only reason.

What I would like to know from fundies: Did Adam have a belly button?

[banjosareunderrated]

6. nah, no, noah...

the devil and pan have no relation whatsoever. horns are not always horns. pitchforks carry no symbolism.

stop it.
;-)

[DemBones DemBones]

13. Pan and Satan have nothing to do with what dutchdoctor wrote. nt

[madeline_con]

10. "Why did god pick a male?

Because he is an invention made up by males, thats the only reason."

Thanks for the voice of reason.

"What I would like to know from fundies: Did Adam have a belly button?"

Why would he, because he was a man, and men have belly buttons? ;)

[banjosareunderrated]

34. alright, to clarify

I think that 70% of humans are female because of the last time i saw an estimate of the world's population and how it broke down into male/female. I will say that i didn't do the census myself. I fish and play guitar and play chess on yahoo. i don't have the time/smarts to compute the gender difference of the worlds' population. I got it from a magazine that probably had pictures. If they were wrong and my belief in said Mad magazine was wrong, i apologize.

Second, i never said that all males ARE females. however, i do accept the science of today which says that all humans are female first and only some become male after some gestation has gone by. if you're in this discussion, i'll assume you know the findings i'm referencing. to be clear, i'm not a scientist or even a person, i'm an idiot that reads so i'm simply accepting what some smart people have told me. there might be some other smart people that disagree. My little A+B=C way of thinking bit on that pretty quick. I cannot think of any other plausible explanation for me having nipples.

god, existentialism/lackthereof is so confining.

[bowens43]

11. You can't disprove the existence of any god or goddess.

In fact , you can't disprove existence the Easter bunny or Santa Claus.

[Birthmark]

14. You have that backwards.

Of course, if you are using prove in the sense of beyond all doubt, well, that's just silly since that is not used anywhere, nor is it possible as far as can be told.

That said, individual gods and goddesses *can* be disproven if enough is known about them (they are well enough defined). They frequently become logical impossiblities. Logical impossibilities are as close to disproven as whatnot. I have disproven several different gods in the last couple of years, including a fundy type or two. The rest that I have analyzed I have shown to be meaningless in human terms, i.e. indistinguishable from nature. So, it can be done.

Now what can't be disproven is that there is *any* god. God is a catchall phrase for a variety of creatures. One of them could conceivably exist. It's not likely, but THAT is what can't be disproven.

[DemBones DemBones]

18. I'd be interested in knowing what "fundy gods" and others

you think you have "disproven." Maybe you could start a separate thread to avoid crowding this one with a side discussion. It's very much related but distinct.

Glad we disagree that the existence of ANY god cannot be disproven, though we differ on whether it's likely or not, I think. I'd say it's a high probability that I think it's a bit more likely than you do. Agree?

Do you agree with me that the existence of ANY god also cannot be proven?
Just for the record and to avoid some squabbles from others. . .

[Birthmark]

19. Threads here seem to sink like a stone

If you'd like, you can come to my board - which is much less visited - and we can discuss this in as much depth as you care to discuss it. You can reach my board by clicking on the logo in my sigline.

"I'd say it's a high probability that I think it's a bit more likely than you do. Agree?"

If you think that the probability of a god existing is more than extremely remote, then you think it's more likely than I do. :)

"Do you agree with me that the existence of ANY god also cannot be proven?"

No, I disagree completely. If there is a god worth the name, then there is no reason why it can't be proven. Now, if you mean some sort of fuzzy god that is indistinguishable from nature...well, that can't be proven. However, it doesn't matter if such a god exists or not since nature is already doing the heavy lifting.

[DemBones DemBones]

25. Ok, and thanks for

the invitation. I looked at your board and will look more later. The one discussion I read (skimmed) looked pretty confrontational, which I don't mind except that it's distracting when you're curious about a particular person's POV. Is there a thread where you have already explained what I asked you about???

[Birthmark]

26. Confrontation?

Well, if it was a religion thread, then it almost certainly included a character called "Nimbo." He was special. He's also left for some reason.

My board does get confrontational from time to time since there are people there who have been posting at each other for many years. Also, we don't censor - so it's not unusual for the stray troll to wander in. They seldom stay long.

Ezboard, which hosts my board for now, recently got hacked. Many threads are entirely gone. Fortunately, I do have one example of a disproof of a god. It's not as clean as I'd like, but it's handy. It's also rather long.

The person whose god is in the hot seat was named "Abby." Her version of god was called "AbbyGod"...for several reasons.

******************************

Abby, in various posts on this board you have made the six statements quoted below.

Statement 1
I've always said that God "surrendered" or "gave up" a part of His omniscience, but I've always been quick to add that He can "reclaim" all or part of it at any time.

Statement 2
This, by definition, is losing a part of His omniscience--or, to be more literally correct, losing his omniscience altogether. But the source was still there; God retained the power to look into men's minds, even though He chose not to.

Statement 3
Since (I believe) He has chosen to limit what He sees in men's minds, human desire is the big "wild card," a chunk of missing information that God can't use in making His predictions.

Statement 4
I guess you would have to say that, on a percentage basis, as more and more people are born, God is getting more and more ignorant.

Statement 5
Indeed. The future doesn't exist anywhere to be seen. All God can do is make a prediction based on His knowledge of current facts.

Statement 6
For example, it offers an explanation as to why God is shown to be "surprised" at various things that man did, e.g., the testing of Abraham, the evil before the flood, etc.

In Statements 1-3: You have clearly stated that God provides free will to humanity by giving up his omniscience. There is no doubt of your contention.

In Statement 4: You not only restate the basic premise of Statements 1-3, you expand it to say that God is actually giving up more and more sources of knowledge as the number of people grows. This is not terribly important but is used to indicate the depth of your belief in the premise in Statements 1-3.

In Statement 5: You state that the future doesn't exist and God's knowledge to predict it is limited.

In Statement 6: You state that God can be surprised by man's actions. You offer it as an explanation of statements 1-3.

These statements on the nature of God as you conceive him lead to several nasty, but inescapable conclusions that prove one of the following:
A) Your God doesn't exist or

B) Biblical Prophecy is of no use whatsoever or

C) Free Will is a complete fraud.

Biblical Prophecy
Biblical prophecy *cannot* be used to predict the actions of humans as stated explicitly in #3 and reinforced by statements 1 and 2. This conclusion is further supported by #5 which says that the future doesn't exist and God can only predict based on current info. This means that prophecy *cannot* be 100% accurate since much of it concerns what human beings will (or in the OT, would) do in the future. Your God cannot see the future or empower others to prophesy with 100% accuracy.

This means that the Bible *cannot* be a useful tool for prediction - either now or in the past. Since this is the only conclusion to be drawn from your statements, you have *no* assurance that Armageddon will occur, that a Judgement Day will take place, or that Lucifer will not win in his rebellion! Even now, some human may be hatching the perfect plan to surprise God (since you state that this can be done) and tip the scales in favor of the Devil! There is no way around this, Abby. Unless you want to claim that God 'reclaims his omniscience.'

Free Will
If you insist that prophecy is 100% accurate then God *must* 'reclaim his omniscience' to accomodate this as in #1. However, the moment he does this, free will is suspended. There can be none since he surrendered his omniscience to allow free will in the first place according to you. However, this fails immediately because God would have to know *when* to reclaim his omniscience; otherwise He could be too late. He clearly could not know when to do this since the future doesn't exist according to you and He *can* be surprised, also according to you.

Anyway, even the smallest suspension of free will negates the entire concept of free will since it means that God is 'making' people act the way He chooses. This means that beyond the shadow of a doubt your God would be responsible not only for creating evil, but perpetrating it personally. That is a premise that you and others have denied elsewhere on these boards.

AbbyGod doesn't exist
If Biblical Prophecy is 100% accurate *and* Free Will exists, then your version of God *cannot* exist. This should be clear to any who read this post. Hopefully, it is even clear to you.

*********

As I said, this isn't the best work I've done. The thread was obviously sidetracked by free will, the problem of evil, and Biblical prophecy. Still, the logic appears sound. :)

[ET Awful]

15. I think I'll quote Douglas Adams

(please substitute babel fish with creature/being/entity of your choice)

Now it is such a bizarrely improbably coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

[DemBones DemBones]

20. Very funny bit by Adams but . . .

1. Not all believers would say that "proof denies faith."

2. God's statement implies that to require proof, or give proof when demanded, would deny faith.

3. The existence of the Babel fish may be a dead giveaway, as Man says here, but God did not present it as a proof. It was merely there and its incredible mindbogglingly useful features something Man could discover by using his senses and brain to study the Babel fish.

3. Man, having free will that God gave him, can observe the incredible ya-da ya- da of the Babel fish and then make his choice.

4. Man may
a. choose to have faith that God created the Babel fish,

b. choose to believe the Babel fish evolved and there is no 'intelligent design,'

c. choose to believe that the Babel fish evolved but 'intelligent design' played some part, in ways unknown to us

QED



Woman, of course, may have her own ideas about Man and God. Ideas that might surprise them both.

[tmorelli415]

16. in the context of the times

a female would not have been listened to or given the respect that a male received at that time - it was a very patriarchal world 2,000 years ago.

the book of genesis was written in the context of the same patriarchal society. In that context, God was referred to as 'He' but most Christians don't see God as a man or a woman. Metaphorically, you must consider Genesis in the context of the time as well: in a patriarchal society 4,000 years ago it was simply not even considered that a metaphorical story would be written with a female character first. It is not about lies and deception - it is about the society in which those people lived.

To say the 'son' of God means he was a boy. He wasn't asked if he was a female as an embryo - that was not the point of his message, and who the heck 2,000 years ago would even know to debate such matters? Was he 'all knowing'? The Christain concept of him is that he was fully man and fully God as well - so yes, as fully man he went through the same embryonic development as everyone else. I am a boy, but that doesn't mean that I was my parent's 'daughter' until the 2nd month of gestation - it means I was a fetus. At the point of conception, it is the father's sperm that determines the eventual sex of a person: a Y sperm eventually becomes a boy, while a X sperm eventually becomes a girl (mom has only X eggs, hence XY for boys and XX for girls) - at no point was a boy a girl but rather he was an XY embryo (a 'boy' embryo from the very start). A boy is a boy is a boy, and a girl is a girl is a girl - chromosome combinations don't just 'kick-in'.

The Bible was not written by scientists. It wasn't meant to be used as a scientific instruction. Fundamentalists may try to read such things into the text, but for the vast history of Judiasm and Christianity it was understood that each book is to be considered in the context of its time and literary style. There is a great deal of variance in time and literary style throughout.

As to who God would 'pick' to be the messiah, the question itself makes no sense in terms of Christian theology. Firstly, God can do whatever 'He' wants to do - the human mind is incapable of understanding God (it is a 'mystery of faith' beyond our experience). Secondly, since Jesus is understood to be God then God didn't 'pick' anything because he is outside the limits of time and space (another mystery outside human comprehension since we are limited by time and space).

So, why did Jesus have nipples? Because he was fully man, and all of us have nipples. To say the 'Son of God' does not mean God had sex with Mary or that he was 'conceived' like the rest of us - it is the best way to describe in human terms (and in a patriarchal time and society) what it meant to be 'begotten' of God outside of time and space.

One can't boil down a concept like God or creation in simple terms, and especially as it relates to a religion that believes that God is outside of human comprehension. It simply can't be fully explained - not because it is deceit or lies - but because the very theology understands itself as one that it cannot be known or expressed in human terms.

There are some things that Christians hold to be absolutely true, but it doesn't mean they are fully understood. Those things are actually few in the traditional historic sense (study Catholic theology and you see that it has only a handful of infallible tenents, for example): the rest is left for the believer to discern on their own, including whether or not Genesis is 'literal' or 'figurative' and how exactly it is that Jesus has nipples.

Jesus didn't say anything that we know of about nipples, fetal development, the Genesis creation story, or the details of his messiah-ship. Why? One can only guess, but it seems plausible that God knew that He could not explain to the human mind what the human mind could not understand.

I'm glad you didn't mean to belittle 'X'tianity with words like 'lies' and 'joke'. I don't like the right wing Fundies and Evangelicals any more than you do, but don't let your anger become hostility toward those who truly believe in the message of Christ even if you don't believe in the religion - I know of nobody who can disagree with what the man Jesus had to say about the world and our place in it.

[DemBones DemBones]

22. Agreed. All very well said

as well. Whether you're Catholic or not, I invite you to post anytime in the Catholic Group. We'd love to see more good discussions there and our numbers are small.

Some may have felt they weren't welcome in our group but everyone is if they can debate without demeaning others and their beliefs.

We do have Guidelines that preclude disrespect for Catholicism or Christianity but I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem for you -- or for several of our atheist friends, Protestant friends (one of our regulars is Episcopalian), nonChristian friends, etc.

Hope to see you, and others, joining us for flame-free debate. :hi:

Edit: I loooked over the thread and everyone who's posted so far, our skeptical and confused opening poster included, would be welcome, too. Great thread so far.

[DemBones DemBones]

17. You ask some interesting questions and

I'll be glad to discuss them with you though I am not and never have been a fundamentalist Christian. What I am, now, by choice when I was over 40, is a Roman Catholic. As the Catholic Church teaches, the Bible is made up of poetry (the Book of Ecclesiastes, Book of Psalms, and portions of many other books), "history" (the Book of Exodus, Book of Numbers) and portions of many other books) and prophecy) and prophecy (in many books; I can't recall one that's pure prophecy off the top of my head.)

There are also portions that are wisdom, the teachings of wise men and women, including the book of Wisdom, found only in Catholic Bibles, or as a bonus in some Protestant ones, though it was once part of the Jewish scriptures. The Book of Proverbs I'd place here, too, but I'm not a trained theologian. And there are portions that teach the laws which God gave to the Israelites (the Jews(, such as the Book of Leviticus.

The New Testament gets into a lot more. It's what the "salvation history" of the Old Testament has been building up to, in the view, at least, of Catholic Christians. (I never heard the term "salvation history" as a Protestant, though I attended Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist churches, and Friends (Quaker) meetings for at least a year each, plus many years of Presbyterian church. All of those years include Sunday School and Bible study classes as well, plus I went to a Presbyterian College that emphasized the interrelationship between religions, as I mentioned above in a post to PsychoDad asking questions about Muslims and the Bible.)

But I won't say more here about the NT because what you ask is related to the OT.
You're asking questions related to the Book of Genesis, the first book of the entire Bible, which has a bit of it all, including "science," which I forgot to mention.

As a trained biologist/retired teacher, naturally I put "science"in quotes as well as "history" and don't think of the Bible as a science book in any way. These portions represent the observations and explanations made by an ancient group of people living in tents in the desert. Could God have filled them in, cleared up their misunderstandings about science? Damned straight he could.

But when you're a parent, you don't explain the finer points of astrophysics, evolutionary theory, or sexual reproduction to a 3 year-old, despite her or his great curiosity. You explain the best you can in terms the child is likely to understand. Parents who are paying attention know what their child(ren) is/are likely to understand at a give time, and they know that kids often learn better through hearing interesting stories than through a recitation of facts and explanations, though both have their place in teaching.

Imagine yourself, briefly, as God, talking to a pre-literate bunch of nomads living in tents in a world that often confuses and frightens them. You are their Heavenly Father, having created them, in some manner. How much do you tell them?


I haven't addressed your specific points yet, but are you with me so far? Have any questions about anything I've written here? Willing, however grudgingly, to admit that I might have a point as to God knowing his audience? If He exists at all, and is the Creator of all, would he not know his creations well, having observed them for some time?

[tmorelli415]

21. Salvation History

for Catholics holds that we continue to grow in our understanding of God and our relation to God throughout history. God reveals to us more as we evolve in our understanding of what we already know. It partly explains why the institution of a Church exists in Catholic theology - to provide humans with a guide for understanding and mitigate fracturing among the one body that we are (one with one another and God, not simply individual creatures - one 'body' cannot live fully broken into pieces and it cannot understand salvation broken either). Catholics and Orothodox have a far more mystical view of their faith than do Protestants. One of the reasons Martin Luther removed many books from the Protestant Bible is because he didn't like their mysticism. He even went as far as to remove certain words from the New Testatment because he felt that salvation history was one of 'faith alone' (Catholic theology believes in 'faith through works' - it is not enough to believe, but rather one must also live our faith through deeds: faith is dead without deeds). Another distinction in the salvation history theology is that it is *NOT* based on the Bible alone (Sola Scriptura) for Catholics and Orthodox - Protestants believe the Bible is the only source of authority but sola scriptura theology is not even Scriptural in itself (it is antithetical to its own premise). That is where sacred tradition and apostolic succession come to play - purely mystical sources of salvation and authority. Without the mystical elements of Christianity, it simply becomes a religion based on a 'rule book' (the Bible) that *must* be interpreted literally because there's no tradition or magesterium to allow for deviance (Sola Scriptura = words without life). Faith alone, Scripture alone - it is all in human terms and thus salvation is static (there is no mystical evolution, salvation history, evolving understanding). How can the concept of God and our relationship to God - a concept so complex and outside the ability of the human mind to understand - be contained in a book that is limited to the human mind and it's ability to communicate in only human words, terms and ideas like nipples and chromosomes? Jewish mysticism and the Torah were never understood as simply words on a page - they also needed sacred tradition and a succession of magesterium to bring the salvation history forward through time.

I like your point about God knowing his audience. There's so much we don't know.

[DemBones DemBones]

23. Great summary and you've made it so that

I don't have to explain salvation history myself! :D

Not that I'd have minded but I didn't plan to stay online this long and can't be here all day.

When I became Catholic, one of my two sponsors for confirmation was a woman in her eighties who gave me a lengthy document on salvation history that she had translated from French (she grew up speaking nothing but French in her Rhode Island family) for the priest we had back then. It really helped me and I was disappointed to see that RCIA does not necessarily cover the topic at all. Having gone through RCIA and then been on the parish RCIA "team" (Rah!), I never saw it addressed in any detail.
I don't think "sola fides" or "sola scriptura" are covered well, either. You need more than eight months of Sundays to learn much about Catholicism, especially at 50 minutes per Sunday (or whatever day RCIA meets; it's Wednesday night here now.)

OK, I'm going to tear myself away from this thread now!

[DemBones DemBones]

24. Posters in this thread have made it a great thread,

building on banjoesareunderrated's excellent questions. One of the best religion threads I've ever seen and I'd nominate it for Greatest except that I know it would be flamebait to too many one-liner drive-by postings.

It'll be interesting to see more replies later, when all of you return and we're joined by others.

P.S. banjoes, i love your user name. And I'll shut up now. Peace. :hippie:

[banjosareunderrated]

33. thx dembones .

:toast:

[PsychoDad]

28. Doesn't mean the "Fundy" God doesn't exist...

Just means they may be wrong about God.

As a Muslim, I don't have the same problems with man being made in the "image" of God. God is beyond human comprehension and has no Form, Gender or Image. (God just isn't human) Thus man couldn't be made in the image of God. Man was made with some of the characteristics of God, the ability to create, the ability to show mercy, the ability to love, among others.

We also escape the "original sin" conundrum. We just say there isn't any. :)

And when we talk about Adam, are we talking about the first man literally created from clay, or the first human with human awareness created metaphoricly from base matter and evolved to house human intellect and a spirit?

[beam me up scottie]

29. So you're saying

that there is no commonly understood definition or concept of God ?

[PsychoDad]

31. Couple of ways to answer that.

At least from an Islamic viewpoint.

1) A Theological view: What we know of God is what has been reveled through his messengers. In Islam that would consist of the Quran . Sura 112 Al Ikhlas or Sincerity sums up the concept of God in 4 verses:

"Say: He is Allah, the One!
Allah, the Eternal, Absolute
He begets not, nor is He begotten.
And none is like Him."

There are also the "Names" of God, which tell us of it's attributes; The Most Merciful, Most forgiving,The source of peace, The Judge, The cause of Life, the Cause of Death, The most rewarding, etc. of these there are 99 in all.

From these we have a commonly shared and understood concept of God.

2) On a personal level: No two people are exactly alike, and God, and our relationship with God, is an intensely internal and personal concept. No two people would probably share exactly the same feelings and thoughts. In this way, God is just as unique as each one of us to each of us.

[beam me up scottie]

32. Thank you.

I had never heard about the 99 different names.

[More Than A Feeling]

30. Never mind

I like the explanations of the above posters much better than what I said.

[gate of the sun]

36. good post

well said....you'd think their would be some consistencies.