OT: What's your religeon?

[Traskelion]

>"I'm a religion of one!"

Yeah......and I bet you'll never figure out why.....
(Unless you actually DO believe these, in which case I'm sorry)

[dogscoff]

On the other hand, it is somewhat surprising on how many people make such strong statements on a book they have never read. ...
It doesn't make sense to dismiss it without first examining the evidence.

I've never read the bible either, but we were forced to read or listen to bits at school, and to watch really poorly-animated bible stories, and to take part in nativity plays and all that, so large chunks of the stories (if not the actual text) are at least familiar to me and to most people I know. The stories and such that I was told appear to be a more-or-less random entanglement of mythology and ancient history.

The idea that every word in the Bible is the actual word of God is absurd to me- you have to admit that Man has a habit of putting words into God's mouth, and to me the bible is nothing more than the end result of two or three thousand years of that: Most of the Old Testament was carried by nothing more than word-of-mouth for centuries before it was ever put into writing, and various political spins were woven into it by different people along the way. Then you have the New Testament, which was written by loads of very different people over several centuries and has also been re-written/ re-translated with "spin" throughout that time by those who have used it to advance their own viewpoints/ justify their own actions. <snip listing of various barbarisms carried out in the name of Christ over the Last two Millenia> More to the point though, the bible- in particular the New Testament- has been interwoven with mythologies from other religions (to ease conVersion from other those religions throughout the ages) so that you have to wonder how much of it there is left that could actually have anything to do with the true story/ teachings of Christ. Quite a lot, probably, but how do you know which bits are which? It just throws into doubt the reliability of the whole thing.

And of course that's all assuming you can get past the "yes, there is a God" belief that is fundamental to the entire process, which to be honest makes the whole thing a non-starter for me.

Finally there's the fact that the bible doesn't seem to carry any single, clear message: Some people use it to promote universal peace and acceptance, others to justify bigotry and murder, even in this day and age. Those are the extremes of the spectrum, be it seems that every possible permutation in-between is accomodated somewhere. They can't all be right. What's the point in basing your faith on a book that can mean anything you want it to mean? I might as well not bother with the book and do whatever I want anyway. (Which is pretty much what I have done.)

[Rasorow]

DarkHorse said:
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Universe is attempting to create God through evolution, and maybe a little osmosis.

Actually I just like saying 'osmosis'.

That's a real interesting thought. Could the Universe itself be trying to create God? Just as the universe was condensed into the <gross understandment> compact ball of energy and matter, then expanded, could life which started with the simplest of forms, progressed through intelligent species, now be trying to fulfill the vacuum of emptiness created by the lack of a higher order? Could the eventual fulfillment of a higher order being be the "event" that begins the contraction of the universe and the devolvment of life?

Rasorow

[Ragnarok]

dogscoff said:
Finally there's the fact that the bible doesn't seem to carry any single, clear message: Some people use it to promote universal peace and acceptance, others to justify bigotry and murder, even in this day and age. Those are the extremes of the spectrum, be it seems that every possible permutation in-between is accomodated somewhere. They can't all be right. What's the point in basing your faith on a book that can mean anything you want it to mean? I might as well not bother with the book and do whatever I want anyway. (Which is pretty much what I have done.)

Actually that is an interesting point. If you were to study the Bible you would see that it does carry a single message or theme throughout it. That theme is the vindication of God's sovereignty by means of the Messianic Kingdom Government. The Bible clearly covers a wide range of other topics but they all tie in with and go back to that main theme.

[AgentZero]

Unapologetically aethiest. Couple points I'd like to make though.
1) Aethism does not count as a religion. Aethism is the lack of belief in God, not a belief in the lack of God.
2) Refering to God as 'He' is not sexist. It's proper English. Ask any English teacher (or English major) and they will tell you that in the English language, the default gender for beings of indeterminate sex is male.

[Alneyan]

Well, there is somewhat of a debate about such pronouns, though the masculine form is still dominant (if not the only one) in grammar books; interestingly, nobody is concerned about this in the French language, even though the situation is exactly the same.

A summary of alternatives among many (from someone involved in linguistics, for lack of a better term) is available here .

[deccan]

Electrum said:
If one takes the time to seriously read & look into the Bible, you find that, though it is not a science book, where it touches on science, it is in perfect harmony with established scientific fact. The same holds true for other areas, as in history & geography. It soon moves to amazement when it comes to examining Biblical prophecy to historical events.

Since no one has come forward to the dispute this, I am going to do so.

You are quite correct that strong, unqualified statements concerning the Bible should not be made without having first made a serious attempt at studying the subject first-hand. Now, let me say that I have read the Bible, cover to cover, several different Versions of it in fact. On the hand, and while this may or may not be true for you, I believe that while many theists do, understandably, have first-hand knowledge of their religious canon, they have relatively little knowledge of the origins of that canon, and the process by which it came into their hands.

There are a lot of Bible-bashing sites on the internet, and I once ran one myself. I won't point you to them since I find that most of them are too partisan, focus too much on nitpicking and try too hard to grasp at tenuous straws. However, I will rely on Wikipedia, which being a community, open-to-everyone effort, should be a much more neutral, qualified, source of information.

First of all, Biblical canon looks at the various different "books" that compose the "Bible" and explains which are canon to which religious denominations and how they became canon to that denomination. The point here is that at various different points in history, different Groups of people had to gather around in a meeting and sit down to decide what God supposedly did say, and what he did not say.

Next, The Bible and history examines whether or not the Bible is actually scientifically and historically correct as you claim.

In any case, some quotes from the Wikipedia page here:

On Genesis:

The Biblical creation tale, up to and including the deluge are not a subject of dispute in the scientific community. They are generally regarded as a myth. The arguments raised come cosmology, geology, evolution (in particular fossil evidence), and textual analysis of the Bible itself, showing similarity to other mythologies.

On Jews living in Egypt:

The number of Israelites stated in the Bible, 600,000, cannot be taken at face value, as this number is thought to exceed the total Egyptian population at the time. A common suggestion is that the word "thousand" should be interpreted here as meaning "family", which gives a figure much more compatible with the historical record.

On Joshua:

The historicity of the book of Joshua is today strongly suspected, as archeological research found no evidence of a massive population increase in Canaan during this time period. At this time the land had a population of between 50,000 and 100,000. Kathleen Kenyon excavated in Jericho from 1952-1958, using improved methods of stratigraphy, and found many details which would seem to conform to the Biblical account of the conquest of Jericho, but she determined that the siege took place 150 years too early for it to have been the city Joshua's army destroyed. She dated the city by the absence of a type of imported pottery common to the era around 1400 B.C. She concluded, as had Sellin and Watzinger before her that the Biblical account of the conquest of Jericho was untenable.

For anyone interested in a detailed account of scientific errors committed in the Bible or scientifically unsound teachings perpetuated by Christian denominations throughout history, Whitehead's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom is an old but still very useful read that is now in the public domain.

Finally, Wikipedia has a page on Alleged inconsistencies in the Bible which details some of the inconsistencies within the Bible itself.

Now, I note that you do not claim that the Bible is wholly inerrant, "merely" that it has proven to be correct on an impressive number of matters. How much "correctness" should be regarded as being truly "impressive" is a really subjective matter of course. For example, I might say that the "Dao De Jing" is impressive, simply by virtue that it contains a large number of self-evident "truisms".

In the case of the Bible, personally, as I believe that it was written purely by men without divine knowledge, I would still expect these men to be reasonably intelligent, knowledgeable and relatively well-travelled, persons, and that the accuracy and correctness of their work to reflect that ability. Consequently, in order to seriously claim that the Bible is "impressive" above and beyond that standard, would require that the Bible include information that could not be known at that time and incur a far higher burden of evidence.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

As a quick reply, I've heard that creation, as described in the bible, is simaliar to many other stories of creation. I'll just point out that the order described in the bible fits the order described by the location of fossils, as it was described in my textbooks.

The arguement that the biblical creation must be false because it is simaliar to many others is a falicy(sp?), if such a congruence exists (I havn't read other religeons religeous texts, yet), it is evidence of some sort of historical congruence or origin point and hardly evidence of falsety(sp?).

[deccan]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
I'll just point out that the order described in the bible fits the order described by the location of fossils, as it was described in my textbooks.

You're going to be have to be more specific, but generally I'd say that this is not correct.

Roughly the order described in Genesis goes like this, quotes from KJV:

1: "...grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself.."

2: "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years..."

(Note: so God supposedly made plants and trees first, then made the Sun and the Moon etc. Ouch.)

3: "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

4: "Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind..."

The above implies that God created fish first (generally correct) but makes the mistake of including whales as fish which as we now know, is not correct. But the writers of Genesis could not know what we know. Generally, evolutionary biology (supported by recent fossil findings) state that whales are descendents of land-based mammals.

It also implies that birds were created before reptiles ("creeping thing"?) and in any case, before land-based animals, and anyone who's watched "Jurassic Park" knows that's not true.

I can supply complete references to anyone who is interested.

narf poit chez BOOM said:
The arguement that the biblical creation must be false because it is simaliar to many others is a falicy(sp?), if such a congruence exists (I havn't read other religeons religeous texts, yet), it is evidence of some sort of historical congruence or origin point and hardly evidence of falsety(sp?).

You are correct of course. But the main point is not to say that it is factually false, merely to say that it is unoriginal. If there is true "congruence", then we must reasonably be able to say that the writers of Genesis based their writings on information sources completely independently of the cultures surrounding them.

Given the close cultural contact between them and the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians etc., it is more reasonable to suppose that the writers of Genesis plagiarized, to use an unkind word, from existing creation mythologies that pre-dated the Jewish religion. On the other hand, if we find significant similarities between two cultures who were completely isolated from one another, then we would be able to speculate on the possibility of congruence.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Creeping things can also mean bugs.

As for the order, KJV, 1st day: 'In the beggining God created the heaven and the Earth.' - Universe, then planet. Same.
'And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.' - Sun after planet. Different.
'and God divided the light from the darkness.' Planetary rotation. Same.
2nd day,
'And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so.' Seems to imply that atmosphere came after water; as far as breathable, same.
3rd day,
'And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear' Same. Also, implies that if the waters were in one place, the land was in one piece - As geologists generally say. Same.
'And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.' After water, atmosphere and land formation, plants. Note that the next verse recaps and references 'trees'.
4th,
'And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:' Stars now. Different.
'And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also.' Different.
5th,
'And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.' Land creatures. Same. Fowl - No reference to feathers. Indeterminate.
'And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.' Creatures coming out of the water. Same. Large sea creatures after (Implied)small ones. Same. No reference to feathers.
6th,
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.' More diverse life forms(Implied) after(Implied) less diverse life forms. Same.
'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.' Humans after the establishment of every other catagory of life. Same.

11 Same
3 Different
2 Indeterminate (Labelling the fowl indeterminate)

That's enough for me to say it's amazingly accurate, given the span of time.

As for the creation myths round about that area, as I said, I havn't met the literature. However, your assertion that they are older is premature. There is no conclusive non-religious evidence that I know of.