Please tell me there are more Atheists out there...

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There is a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan (?) who has studied the brain enough to know how to stimulate it in such a way as to inspire religious or "spiritual" feelings in people. He puts this football helmet with wires on your head, pushes a few buttons on a laptop and *poof* you sense the presence of God in the room; feel infilled with the Holy Spirit; etc. Whatever you want to call it, this guy can create that feeling simply by electrically stimulating the right part of your brain.

Rather silly, IMO, to base one's philosophy on a tingly feeling one got 10 years ago in the pit of your stomach.

And tumors are one thing, but I think many of history's "prophets" could have been schizophrenics or simply con-men.

Honestly, if I told my wife that God spoke to me last night and told me I had His permission to sleep with the housekeeper since she's young and fertile and you're old and infertile, how do you think she'd react?? In this day and age you'd be pegged a con-man or a nut; 4,000 years ago they found a religion after you.

Then there's the whole 40-days-and-nights without food on top of a mountain. Anybody going that long without food is bound to start hallucinating. Again, these days -- thanks to science and a better understanding of the brain -- we'd write such things off to the brain playing tricks on you. 4,000 years ago it was the voice of God.

 

Susipaisti:
Very good deductions, but:
circumcision is a way of seperating jews from the rest of the world, it is used to 'set apart' those who are under God's covenant with Abraham. Christians are under the 'new covenant', one made with Christ and the Holy Spirit. We are not commanded to seperate ourselves in the same way.
As for pork, God tells Luke, I think, in a vission that it is ok for christians to eat 'unclean' foods. It is in Acts somewhere.
Also, was it Sun Tzu that asked, "Am I really a man, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man." We all know there are situation where your senses tell you something is there that isn't, or, more commonly, don't tell you something is there that is. Just because you can't sense the mosquito, doesn't mean it isn't sucking your blood.
And how often did these 'tumor-visions' accurately prophesy the future, tell you how to avoid a disaster, or give beneficial advice on something? There are thousands of prophecies in the Bible, many surrounding the Christ. If these are accurately fulfilled hundreds to thousands of years later, you may want to give them credit. If these impossibilities are accurately fulfilled one year later, as in the case of Isaac's birth, you had better give them due credit.

 

The problem is that there is no physical evidence to prove that these were actually prophesies as opposed to someone writing after the event. The earliest writings we have are dated to what.. 400 years AD? As it is, there is a reasonable amount of evidence to show that, over the generations, people within the church have edited the information anyway.

 

The thing is, most of these supposedly accurate visions are pretty vague. They're quite open to interpretation. And just as an example, many theologians say that the book of Revelations was written as an encrypted, symbolic message to the congregation of the time, who were persecuted by the Romans. Babylon meaning Rome and so on.

And none of the original scriptures remain. All we have are copies of copies of copies. Even the oldest ones available have a very good chance of having been 'redefined' by people over the years.

As for the pork thing...couldn't God, for instance, also appear in a vision to a priest in your home town and tell him it's okay to be gay? Would you accept it if he told you so? Would it then be okay to be gay?

I've been under the impression that Christianity is based on what Jesus said. He tells people to honor the old commandments, except the ones he redefines. The circumcision is one of many things he does not despute. If the command that Christians don't have to circumscribe their sons, or that it's okay to eat pork, hasn't come from Jesus, it must have come from an apostle later on. If the disciples were given authority to change the rules like that, it means the priests of today can do the same. After all, aren't priests the successors of the apostles? Couldn't the churches of today redefine the laws too, since the apostles did? The disciples were in no way sons of God like Jesus was said to be.

Ah, but a mosquito *can* be sensed. Even if you were distracted and didn't feel the sting, you can feel the itch afterwards and so on. Carbon monoxide or radiation can't be seen of smelled, but their presence can be detected via machinery and their after-effects *can* be sensed. It can all be tracked down to cell-level and beyond. The presence of a 'greater being' can't be detected like that.

 

Circumcision is a moot point. I was raised Christian (Catholic), and my parents didn't get me circumcised despite the recommendations of the doctors. Ten years later I was circumcised anyway because the alternative was death from an infection in the pipe. Nowadays, circumcision is commonplace even among non-Jews to prevent just such complications down the line.

P.S. If you see a circumcised baby crying for no reason, there's a reason. You can't imagine how sensitive it is afterward; I think it was more than a week before I could stop stuffing my briefs with toilet paper so it wouldn't move around. *shudder* Ruined a friend's birthday party with my swearing, as I recall.

 

Research the Dead Sea Scrolls, everyone. There are copies, I admit copies, of all the old testament books except Ester in them. These copies date to about 300 BC. These copies are word-for-word identical to the modern hebrew copies of the same books! No variations have been found to date. I think we can believe that if the old testament hasn't changed in 2300 years, it hasn't changed since it was written. The same can be applied to the new testament.
Also, while many of the prophesies are symbolic, see Daniel, many of them are not at all. They say the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, from a virgin, to the line of David, that he will never break a single bone, that he will be "pierced for our iniquities, bruised for our transgressions", that he will be burried in someone else's grave, and continue to predict thousands of other things, all of which Jesus fulfilled, and many of which we have Roman records of him fulfilling.
Many prophesies in the old testament speak of nations and places that were long thought mythical until within the past century, archeologists found many of them, and found references to many more in independant records.
You also have to make a distinctions between commandments from God to men, and rules He gave the Jews. God specifically says that circumcission is to set Jews apart as part of his covenant with Abraham and that anyone not circumcised is not part of THAT commandment.
Jesus din't change any of the commandments, he just clarified some of them.
In christianity, every member has a direct relationship with God. God could tell anyone anything. Luke, who was told not to "call anything unclean which God has made", food, was neither a disciple or an apostle, he was a student of a student of a student of Jesus. He never actually met the man. God, however, does not contradict himself. He said homosexuality was a sin in the old and new testament, so it applies to both Jews and Christians.
As for carbon monoxide and radiation, those were only detected and understood recently. Two hundred years ago, anyone could say they don't believe in such things, but the effects are still there and the consequences are still there. Just because we can't prove something, doesn't mean it isn't real. And there are plenty of things we can't prove that are quite real, nonetheless. Arguing based on human knowledge is moot because human knowledge is so incredibly limited.

 

Do bear in mind that the hebrew scriptures weren't translated at any point. The books Christians of today use have been translated many times over. And 300 BC is not that early really, if the originals are from 5000 years ago or something like that.

Also should be noted that long before *any* scriptures of the Old Testament were written down, the stories had been passed down orally from generation to generation to generation. Who's to say they couldn't have changed along the way?

As for the prophecies about Jesus - I'm not convinced he was born of a virgin. That can hardly be proven. Isn't it a possibility that Mary and her hubby had heard of that 'born of a virgin'-prophecy and then set up a little scheme? The place can be a coincidence, and it can also be that one of the reasons people were so convinced he was the messiah was *because* he was born in Betlehem - the existence of the prophecy can very well have played a part in the turn of events, instead of being a mere beforehand observation. People are very eager to see what they want to see.

Unless you specify this a little I really don't see what this has to do with anything. So they were aware of certain places, so what? Does it take second sight to know of places that do or did exist?

Where exactly does this distinction come from? For instance, the wrongness of homosexuality is right there next to circumcision and unclean foods. Why is one thing considered still relevant while others aren't, especially since all the references to homosexuality in the New Testament come from the apostles, not Jesus?

So if God came to someone else and disputed some other former commandment, it would be okay?

Isn't the whole issue of unclean food you just mentioned a contradiction? He had clearly stated before what was to be considered unclean.

This I agree on - there *can* be things that are real even though we can't prove them to be, but we can't quite know that. However, just because something can't be proven either way, doesn't in my mind warrant a steadfast, devout belief that it's there. Or a specific idea of *what* it is that is there, if there indeed is anything.

Human knowledge is indeed limited. And I think religions are created by limited human minds, as an attempt to reach beyond the limits.

Edit: Refined the last bits.

[ November 16, 2005, 01:52: Message edited by: Susipaisti ]

 

Then the Alleys really serve no purpose, do they? Alright, Tal, you can shut 'em down now.

Seriously though, that's stepping over the logic line a bit. I agree with your previous two sentences:

but saying that we can't argue with what humans wrote because they were 'divinely touched' or whatever is downright ludicrous. No conduit can be perfect, so a number of things could have been lost in translation to our puny human minds. One reason I don't put much faith in what is in the Bible (or the Qoran, or the Talmud, or any other religious document) is because it is, by its very method of recording, a flawed accounting.

As an agnostic I think, "Trust not in the Word, but in the Spirit." But when I initially went the atheistic route, the idea was mostly, "They can't be completely right, so why should I listen to them at all?"

 

"Pathetic humans! Prepare to write down the recipe!"

Sorry, can't get Morbo from Futurama out of my head now.

Aha! Maybe not socks, but I was onto something in the ToB forum!

(sorry, Fel, it's been a long day so far... and I went through the same experience, minus the paper)

 

Why have I quoted that, you may find yourself asking? Because I think that it's an absolutely patheticly structured arguement, so I'm going to claim that someone else wrote it! *points to the person next in line* It was him!

Anyway, the point of what I was trying to say, in a not so rude way, is that, just because something can't be proved, doesn't mean that it's real.

To quote Douglas Adams on this matter:

- 'I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me, "Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen it for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian beaver chees is equally valid" - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God use to be the best explination we'd got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.' -


And another quote from the same man, which I think sums it all up much better:

- You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg... -

 

Haha, that's what we've been arguing about, I guess. Proof of God...


I suggest you guys read Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason." Pretty good stuff, I think, even though I am not a deist myself, and I don't agree with a part of the ending (I think it is blaming Jewish people for the things that the bible missed... a little confusing). But his ideas proving (or at least showing) why the bible is wrong are pretty interesting. I dont have a link for you guys, because I'm reading it in a book right now, I'll try and post it later.

 

Susipaisti:
I actually wasn't saying that the Bible was perfect and unaltered, I was just saying that since it hasn't been altered in about 1/2 it's written life, ~2300 years is absolutely amasing for anything like this, the idea that it is accurate to the original is not completely irrational.
As for Jesus, did the prophecies decide that he wouldn't have a tomb of his own? Did they determine that he would die from being pierced (the nails)? There are over 2000 prophecies to explain here. No single one is totally unreasonable, but all of them together present odds of 1:2.8?^480. That's not an exact number, but its in that order of magnitude. That many people have not walked the planet Earth in the sum total of all history.
The places were just meant to show that people have called things in the Bible wrong before only to find out that the Bible was right all along.
First off, the circumcision thing is in a whole different book, told to different people, and restricted to certain conditions, as I have already explained. Also, many of the commands in Leviticus, including unclean meat, are not talking about sin, but about ceremonial uncleanness. If it says, "Don't do it." it's a sin. If it says, "If you do this, you have to wait a while or purify yourself or something before you can offer sacrifices/be allowed into Jerusalem/something." that's not a sin. That is a rule God set up for the Jews. Some have health reasons, some have religious reasons, some are just there. Therefore, God didn't contradict himself when He told Luke to eat stuff, He was just clarifying, because Luke wasn't under the old Covenant anymore.
I have unshakable faith in God because He has proven Himself to me, many, many times. I cannot give you physical evidence, therefore I cannot prove it to you. If you saw a UFO land in your back yard and little gray men come out and ask for directions to Roswell, you would belive in UFOs. You would have proof. You couldn't prove it to anyone else, though. Does that make your proof any less real? Just because the round indentations from the landing pads in your back yard could have been faked?
Felinoid:
I had expected better of you, though I did leave myself open. I was refering to the spiritual senses arguement. If a theory is presented, and there is nothing in human knowledge to prove or disprove it, then arguing based on human knowledge can only lead back to 'maybe', and not to any kind of final answer.
Saber:
I haven't read 'Age of Reason', though I'll keep my eyes out for it, but I would follow that up with 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis.

Edit: I hope I have cleared everything up. I'm tired of being misquoted, misunderstood, or asked to explain something over and over again. That's the third time I've explained circumcision in three days, all on the same board.

 

I bet that in another 1000 years time that (unless the world blows up - which is another thread) that Shakespeare will still be unaltered. Doesn't mean we should accept it as being a true reflection of events or the basis for religious beliefs.

 

Exactly; I pointed out where you had left yourself open so that you could close it, which you did quite nicely. TBH, I look back at that post and see a number of places that I hadn't realized were so adversarial-looking, and for that I apologize.

Incidentally, I think those 'maybes' are where agnosticism comes from.

 

I think Harbourboy hit the nail on the head here. History, even if it has been unaltered, is not always correct. Many biases are always in play. If you ask anyone who has studied history they will tell you the same thing. Just because the bible has been unaltered in how ever many years it is, does not mean that it is a correct, detailed version of events from taht time period.

To get an accurate reading, one would need to compare a wider range of sources. In many cases, I'd imagin this would be near impossible, just due to the time factor. But in some cases it is certainly possible. The Chinese empire, for example, was around back then - and they certainly had forms of a written language. So regarding things like the great flood, that effected the entire world (if I'm remembering right, that is) for one to be certain that such events did occur, we would need to find evedence of such things in their records.

What I am saying, is that no historian will be ready to accept that something is just from one source of evidence - even less so if that source is a story form. It's similar to science, no experiment would be deemed acceptable without repeats done to it.

 

Exactly. There is evidence that the great flood was very localized. It affected the areas the Old Testament originates from. To the people of the time, that was the whole world, and that's what they decided to write their God to have said. "Wipe out the entire world and all in it."

Reasonably accurate to its original *written* form, maybe. But for example the actions of Jesus weren't recorded by eyewitnesses; those too were passed down orally before anyone wrote them, albeit for a shorter time than in the case of the Old Testament. Tales can get pretty tall.

And even if the word itself stays unchanged, interpretations surely have been great and varied over the centuries. Still are.

As for the 2000+ prophecies, first of all that number means there should be on average two Jesus-related prophecies per page. I suppose I should investigate them a bit more, but quite a few of them do sound vague and far-fetched still. I mean, 'pierced?' It covers a wide variety of means - spears, daggers, sharpened poles etc. It's like prophecizing he would be 'bludgeoned' and as long as he gets stoned, clubbed, masticated by fists, crushed under a boulder - ka-ching, we have a winner. That's how prophecies work. Some people say Nostradamus accurately predicted WWI, WWII, cd's, whatever. Others see a bunch of vague rants that could mean a whole lot of things or nothing at all.

In Leviticus 11. there are actually two lists of animals - the first one (including pigs) is very strict, "do not eat these." The second one is "if you touch these you become unclean and must do x." If people read that whole chapter and pay attention to the wording, it's really strange that they should think "oh, this only applies to the Jews, not us." Or "it was tied to that specific time and place."

The forbidden sexual things, homosexuality among them, are dealt with in Leviticus 18. Whatever is said about them later in the New Testament, comes from the *apostles*, who are no more divine than the average guy. Wasn't it God and Jesus who were supposed to lay down the law, not the disciples later on? The whole reason the gay issue is still considered relevant and the pork thing isn't, seems to be that the disciples made their own interpretations. People. Not unlike the people of today. The New Covenant? Between Jesus and the people? With a few middle men, it seems.

And that Luke fellow. Couldn't anybody just claim that "God spoke this to me" and then dispute some old commandments? This whole thing of picking and choosing which parts of the Old Testament are universal and which parts only apply to Jews, for this and that reason, seems completely illogical to me, an attempt to explain the contradictions in a convenient way. The same thing's been done for ages - slavery was at a time justified by what the Old Testament says.

How come nobody says the forbidding of homosexual acts was just a purity issue among the Jewish people under those conditions?

Stalemate, I guess. One could say the very same thing about Islam. Or, I know it's a mean thing to say, but a belief in a big blue elephant in a different dimension. The more I study the Bible and hear people's arguments in favor of it, the further my agnosticism starts to tilt towards atheism.

 

I really doubt Shakespere would survive a total societal upheaval unaltered. There are enough people that want to change it without such a catestrophic force.
Rotku:
The Great Flood in biblical times probably pre-dates writing. We don't really know when it occured because we don't know how many generations there were from Noah to Abraham, among other things. Also, are you saying you want to repeat the great flood?
Susipaisti: Actually, most of the Gospels were dictated by men who had actually seen these things themselves. As for the 2-per-page average, considering how dense books like Daniel are with messianic prophecies, that sounds about right. You're looking at a prophecy for every other sentence or so there.
Also, as I said, plenty of people fulfilled one or two or even a dozen of these prophecies, but no one else fulfilled all of them, or even came close. And don't even bring Nostradamus into this, that's as much prophecy as the lunch my cat chucked up is. There are books upon books explaining all about how Nostradamus is BS.

 

There are books upon books explaining all about how the Bible is BS.

 

There are books upon books explaining all about how to meet aliens.

 

Something I heard on Drawn Together last night: