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> “I will kill everything, except the floating ones and the swimming ones, who will get out due to a loophole.” -- Eddie Izzard, speaking as god I've never un

• sp332 14y ago
  "Bible fanatics" is a little insulting to several religions. Anyway a lot of things that look like they took a lot of time (I think the Grand Canyon is the canonical example) are alternatively explained as being results of the Flood.
  • Luc 14y ago
    Or rather, 'explained'.
  • simon 14y ago
    Technically, "bible fanatics" is only insulting to one religion, Christianity. The Jews observe the Torah, which while being 99'ish percent the same as the OT is technically different because of ordering of the books and the combining of some.
    • sp332 14y ago
      Well the Catholics, Protestants, and Mormons use different "bibles" even though they are largely the same content. So I was including the Jews as well.
      • simon 14y ago
        Yeah, although it pretty much depends on how you define bible. The Catholics use the KJV with the Apocrypha inserted between the OT and NT. Most of the denominational churches (loosely what you referred to as Protestants) use similar bibles unless you want to be picky over their use of different translations or get into which original manuscript they were translated from. And that's just getting warmed up. I'm into this stuff.
        • jemfinch 14y ago
          Catholics don't use the KJV. King James was a Protestant. The contemporaneous parallel to the KJV used within the Catholic Church is the Douay-Rheims, but even that isn't approved for liturgical use in English; only the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and New American Bible (NAB) are. The term "apocrypha" is one only used by Protestants, as a pejorative term for the books Luther excised from the Septuagint, the Old Testament used by Jesus and the Apostles. The non-pejorative term is "deuterocanonicals", so-called because they were canonized later than the Old Testament books Luther accepted. Notably, Luther also excluded four New Testament books from his canon: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Revelation. I suppose he found sola fide a lot easier to defend when he didn't have to contend with James' "So you see that a man is justified by works, not by faith." The Reformation didn't follow Luther's lead on the New Testament, though, and that's why Protestant Bibles have 66 books, not 62. I'd suggest a little more warm up :) Some of us were really into this stuff before departing the faith.
          • simon 14y ago
            Thank you for the pointers, I shall read some more on this. Sorry you departed the faith. Perhaps, you should have been really, really into this stuff? :-)
            • jemfinch 14y ago
              Being "really, really into this stuff" is why I lost my faith. The deeper I dug, the more I found that none of the meaningful Christian beliefs that I held stood up to the epistemic bar I'd adopted as an adult. You can read more details at http:?/epistemicfaithcrisis.wordpress.com/ if you're interested.
  • jggonz 14y ago
    Don't be so sensitive. Us 'non-Bible fanatics' are always very accepting of religious people in general. You should do the same.
    • sp332 14y ago
      You can't really speak for everyone who does not believe in the Bible. Intolerant atheists are not exactly rare, nor are followers of other religions who are not very accepting of bible-believers. Don't be so sensitive. I said "slightly", but it is definitely belittling. edited for clarity
      • jemfinch 14y ago
        Please don't refer to atheists as "militant" unless they're wielding weapons and waging wars for atheism. There really are militant groups in this world, many of them militant in support of their religion; it's utterly unfair to put "atheists who oppose religion on Internet discussion boards" in the same group as true militants.
        • simon 14y ago
          More people have been killed by officially atheist governments (esp. in 20th century) than by any religions.
          • jeremyarussell 14y ago
            Where's the data to support this claim? You do understand there were the crusades and all the violence out of that. (Don't get me started on the wars actually talked about in the bible as well, where god says from Deuteronomy 20:14 "As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies." So basically he gave the warriors clearance to rape and pillage.)
            • Dove 14y ago
  • naner 14y ago
    Anyway a lot of things that look like they took a lot of time (I think the Grand Canyon is the canonical example) are alternatively explained as being results of the Flood. That is not remotely plausible. I'll admit I am a little aggravated, but I'm not going to climb up on my high-horse and lecture you. This is already way off-topic and if you were interested you could easily find the information on your own. I will just say that if you believe in God and miracles then you don't need an alternative explanation for the Grand Canyon (or anything else since God can do anything). So lets not needlessly force the religious history pieces into the science puzzle.
    • Dove 14y ago
      I will just say that if you believe in God and miracles then you don't need an alternative explanation for [anything] Not at all. Here's a crude thought experiment: suppose you believed in a God who performed confirmed miracles, but who had only performed two or three in recorded history. Now suppose you lost your wallet and spent five minutes looking for it, without success. Would it be rationally responsible, at that point, to ascribe its disappearance to divine intervention? How long and how hard would you have to look before that even made it onto the list of hypotheses? Just because God can do anything doesn't mean that's always a good explanation. In fact, to a naive observer, secularists are kind of in the same boat. Bear with me for a moment: There's an intelligent design argument that says the laws of physics for this universe are extremely fine-tuned; change any number of physical constants by even a small amount, and the universe never develops stars. The response to that goes, this is just the one universe we can see; there may be many others with different constants. And while this particular setup might be improbable, it's what we have to see in order to be here. The response to that goes, if you can go invoking a practically infinite number of unseen universes, what's the point of trying to explain anything? Invoke a few more universes, and you could write anything off as chance. And the response to that goes, roughly, well, you don't want to ascribe things to once-in-a-multiverse events unless you've looked really hard first (like we have with the cosmology stuff). See? We're kind of in the same boat. The reality--getting back to miracles--isn't anything like that simple; there is a great diversity of opinion in Christendom about how often God performs miracles, and when, and how you can tell he's done it. But as far as I can tell, they agree on two things: (1) The miracle has to make theological sense (there's usually an obvious reason for it), and (2) It doesn't happen anything like often enough to threaten the effectiveness of science. Though there are folks who will claim God could have created dinosaur fossils just to test our faith, this is very much a fringe view. Most theologians would be very uncomfortable with the idea that God has behaved in a scientifically deceptive way. Quite the opposite; the entire well-accepted realm of natural theology is based on the idea that God has set up the world to make sense and to be investigated and even to teach us things. If there were evidence to the contrary, it would be profoundly upsetting for a lot of scholars.
  • robodale 14y ago
    Oh dear, we don't want to be insulting any religions. 'Santa Claus for grown ups' might get angry.
    • lurkinggrue 14y ago
      Wait... are you telling me Santa is not real?? Oh thanks a lot!
• mrodwin 14y ago
  They fixate on it specifically because it is one of the bibles most conspicuous flaws. If you're going to try and argue that the bible is literally true the first thing someone is likely to throw back at you is this story. So you have to try and make it seem plausible.
  • carlob 14y ago
    It's actually much easier to disprove the fact that the bible is literally true by reading the first few pages, where the creation of Adam and Eve is told in two different ways: one where they are created at the same time and the other with the famous rib.
  • jlgreco 14y ago
    I think you are exactly right. If you are a sensible person the story is the low hanging fruit for any "not literally true" argument but if you are some sort of biblical literalist then the story is the obvious starting point. If you can get people to buy into that one, the rest fall like dominoes.
  • drcube 14y ago
    In general, I think religions require a few outlandish, unbelievable stories. Kind of like a shibboleth. Anybody can believe stories backed up by evidence and reason. But it takes a special kind of devotion to our group/tribe/congregation/whatever to believe these ridiculous absurdities. That's how we know you're one of us.
• simon 14y ago
  Careful, your lack of tolerance is showing. There are records in the ancient historical stories of many cultures of a world-wide flood. Update: the downvotes have started already! Thank you for firmly establishing my point! :-)
  • krenoten 14y ago
    World-wide flood? There has never been a worldwide flood during the brief time that we have been on earth. There are a few potential periods where the earth might have been covered in snow, the last of which might have been around 650 million years ago during the Marinoan period. There have also been plenty of big floods, but nothing remotely resembling what the bible describes.
  • Irregardless 14y ago
    I upvoted you, even though you misunderstood what I was saying ;)
    • simon 14y ago
      Thank you. I shall both upvote your original comment and thank you for your update to your original comment. I am one of those literal word of God people, but that kinda comes with the territory as a pastor. :-)
      • lotharbot 14y ago
        Not all pastors are literalists. Mostly just those from the subset of Christianity called "Fundamentalism" [0], which was founded around a hundred years ago as a reaction (IMO, an overreaction) to "Liberal Christianity" [1]. It's worth reading up on the history of those movements to get a clear understanding of where the modern move toward strong literalism originated. You may also find it worthwhile to read Origen's De Principiis, particularly book IV sections 16-22 [2], and Augustine's On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, particularly chapter 19 [3]. I've found a number of very early Christian scholars tend to treat certain sections of the Bible (particularly the first sections of Genesis) as not being intended to be understood literally. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Christianity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Christianity [2] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.vi.v.v.ii.html http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.vi.v.v.ii.html [3] http://college.holycross.edu/faculty/alaffey/other_files/Augustine-Genesis1.pdf http://college.holycross.edu/faculty/alaffey/other_files/Aug...