Perfection
The Great Head.
Berzerker, have you ever watched Stargate? What do you think of it?
In the Beginning...
- Thread starter Berzerker
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Berzerker
Deity
I liked the movie, never really watched the series though
but a flying pyramid?
but a flying pyramid?
That is your incredulity level?
So, there was a debate going on since the Flood? In what alternate universe, one wonders. The Flood (as in the biblical flood from the Noah fantasy) isn't a historical (or eve prehistorical) event. Not in our universe/timeline anyway. But I'm sure there has been an ongoing debate in the Stargate universe. (Not the Star Trek universe, mind you.)
Lexicus
Deity
timtofly said:
False.
timtofly said:
I don't see what any of this has to do with the fact that evolution happened, and is continuing to happen as we speak. My acknowledging that evolution is a fact states nothing about gods one way or the other.
If one continues to refer to 'the Flood' as an historical event, then we know that the person isn't really interested in the actual facts around the theological discussion.
You keep insisting Adam really existed. Where's your evidence? You can't clone someone who never existed.
Why do creationists keep protesting evolution? They want creationism in science classes, and I'm trying to keep this nonsense out of science classes.
I protest pseudoscience, unless it's clearly labeled as SF/F meant for entertainment purposes only, with a clear understanding that it's not real. FYI: There was a time in my life when I would have been nodding and smiling right along with you and Berzerker. But that was 40 years ago, and what happened was that I finally took some proper science courses - chemistry, biology, astronomy, studied physics, geography, anthropology, history, and listened to real astronomers explaining why astrology is nonsense and myths are only stories. In short, I got a better education and grew up.
The only thing about conflicting versions of the story by the same author that leaves me in the dark is why the author (or authors) decided to be careless instead of careful. There's a phrase that's commonly used regarding warp speed in Star Trek: ships move at the speed of plot, not plausible physics. That's how the bible works - things happen for the sake of plot, and it's impossible to figure out any consistency, because consistency isn't what the authors cared about.
Of course you like the back and forth with Berzerker. In all the 28 pages (56 pages for those who use the forum default) of this, neither of you have said much that actually makes any sense. I get that you disagree on some points, but it's like an argument between one person who insists that 2+2=3 and another person who insists that 2+2=9,891,383,827. Neither one makes any sense.
So now you're moving even more goal posts. You've alternately insisted that the flood happened several thousand years ago, then you jumped to hundreds of thousands of years ago, then billions, and now you're saying it happened within the last 2000 years? Make up your mind.
If you insist that Jesus really existed, then he would have been born of a human man and human woman in the normal way, and either Mary had a talent for story-spinning as to why she got pregnant out of wedlock, or she and Joseph didn't wait until they were married. Modern artificial insemination methods did not exist back then, and there is no way you will ever convince me that it did.
Are you claiming that Jesus was a different species?
Since some of the statues were meant to represent specific pharaohs, are you claiming that they were some kind of alien or other species?
Statues are a way of honoring a person, people, or event, whether real or fictional. Some statues are life-sized; we have lots of them set up around my city (people and events that are part of our history, and it's even traditional to put a toque and scarf on one of them in the winter so he doesn't get cold). Some statues are larger than life, significantly so because of the intention of glorifying the subject. The Egyptian statues aren't huge because they're life-sized. They're huge to glorify whichever pharaoh ordered their construction. It's a form of PR that says "Look at me. I am great. Respect me."
Why? They had skilled mathematicians, architects, engineers, and people who studied the positions of the stars. They had pharaohs and a government that took a long view toward planning things like large monuments, and the manpower to make it happen. Space aliens and supernatural beings were not required for this.
Observation, measurement, looking at the actual data that we find, and figuring it out. Some people have tried to reconstruct things like obelisks, and in doing so, have rediscovered the techniques used by the Egyptians.
Did you take biology in high school? If so, you should already have learned how human reproduction works, along with basic genetics.
What happens to ice cubes in a freezer if there's no electricity?
Because humans invented gods to explain stuff.
Apparent contradiction?
It is far more likely than not that Jesus the man actually existed, regardless of whether or not he really was the Son of God. How his mother arrived in the family way is of course a different issue.
Berzerker
Deity
nothing happens in his scenario
I'd like his response to my question. I am doing you the courtesy of assuming that you understand where I'm going with this.
timtofly
One Day
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So writing about something that happened to a human only works after 500 AD. Anything before that is suspect, because humans then could not communicate what they experienced??
If god's existing on earth is not part of this discussion, I may agree. I did not realize this was a theological discussion in the general use of the word theological.
It really does not matter if the Flood was an historical event or not. When you read the accounts about people surviving a flood in the context of there being gods on the earth, then a flood event seems to be a point where gods no longer walked among men.
Maybe there is no demarcation at all, but I don't see any one giving any other point in time. If there were Sons of God at all, and they were still living on earth, I doubt there would need to be a debate, but since there do not seem to be any, I just choose the Flood as that is mentioned in the same few chapters of the writing that even mentions the Sons of God. After the Flood they seem to be missing from the text. Most other writings of the ancients just calls them gods. I would assume the Son part is either understood or to avoid being redundant, gods would work just fine. Even the Greeks referred to God and gods.
It would seem that Christians in 300 AD were just as delusional about it, as they seemed to let Peter get away with pointing out the fact that there was a pre-flood world: 2 Peter 2:1-5 "There used to be false prophets among Gods people, just as you will have some false teachers in your group. They will secretly teach things that are wrongteachings that will cause people to be lost. They will even refuse to accept the Master, Jesus, who bought their freedom. So they will bring quick ruin on themselves. Many will follow their evil ways and say evil things about the way of truth. Those false teachers only want your money, so they will use you by telling you lies. Their judgment spoken against them long ago is still coming, and their ruin is certain. When angels sinned, God did not let them go free without punishment. He sent them to hell and put them in caves of darkness where they are being held for judgment. And God punished the world long ago when he brought a flood to the world that was full of people who were against him. But God saved Noah, who preached about being right with God, and seven other people with him."
The Bible is not even interested in the facts around what is theological or not...
"These false teachers are bold and do anything they want. They are not afraid to speak against the angels. But even the angels, who are much stronger and more powerful than false teachers, do not accuse them with insults before the Lord. But these people speak against things they do not understand. They are like animals that act without thinking, animals born to be caught and killed. And, like animals, these false teachers will be destroyed." 2 Peter 2:10-13
I thought I was being insane. Now I am dogmatic?
I thought this thread fit that description?
Thanks for trying to follow along.
Before the Babylonian captivity there was the Priest, Levite, and later the king's authority for keeping the Oral and Written tradition of the life of the Jews safe and handed down properly. It is assumed that the captivity was a major disruption and the editors of the new kingdom did what they could to restore the records they did have, and they had to re-square them with the oral tradition. The text was even being translated into Greek at the same time. I am not sure why a seemingly scholarly endeavor has been relegated to a "just made up" status. But it seems that all the writings and stone or metal etchings were all just humans making things up. They were not based on any reality that humans were actually experiencing?????
The claim of some is that it was all fabricated at that point, but there was enough evidence then (that is gone now), that Judaism itself accepted the canon that became the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Judaism does not accept the OT name, because they do not think that Jesus was the arbitrator of the New Testament. The Hebrews do not think that their way of life changed that much, other than the captivity and the dispersion of most of their population before the Babylonian's captured the remainder (only for 70 years), from the time of Moses, until the Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.
I have never insisted when the Flood was. I just use it as a reference point.
Even the Sumerians in their account of Marduk, thought he was born a god on earth who went back in time and created the earth into it's current form. That seems to have led to the notion that humans made the story up. They did not make it up, they got their facts mixed up.
I was pointing out an ironic thought. If you keep insisting that a species can have an offspring that is totally different from it's parents, viable on it's own, and unable to mate with it's siblings, and add information to the genome, what would you call it?
Jesus did not claim to be a mutant, although, with today's mythology I guess he claimed to be a superhero. A mutation would place his claims into the realm of science, as that seems to be the aspect of evolution that people have an issue with. It is very misleading when a group of people are accused of being against the whole of evolution. The only points of conflict are mutation and time. Scientist cannot reproduce either because they cannot mutate or refuse to a new species, and they do not have time. Should not the field be relegated to pseudo-science?
Since some of the statues were meant to represent specific pharaohs, are you claiming that they were some kind of alien or other species?
Statues are a way of honoring a person, people, or event, whether real or fictional. Some statues are life-sized; we have lots of them set up around my city (people and events that are part of our history, and it's even traditional to put a toque and scarf on one of them in the winter so he doesn't get cold). Some statues are larger than life, significantly so because of the intention of glorifying the subject. The Egyptian statues aren't huge because they're life-sized. They're huge to glorify whichever pharaoh ordered their construction. It's a form of PR that says "Look at me. I am great. Respect me."
Why? They had skilled mathematicians, architects, engineers, and people who studied the positions of the stars. They had pharaohs and a government that took a long view toward planning things like large monuments, and the manpower to make it happen. Space aliens and supernatural beings were not required for this.
Observation, measurement, looking at the actual data that we find, and figuring it out. Some people have tried to reconstruct things like obelisks, and in doing so, have rediscovered the techniques used by the Egyptians.
I am just pointing out what people have claimed over the last 3000 years.
Are we talking about reproduction or the evolution of a new species? I accept evolution, I just do not accept your interpretation of evolution, when you claim a species mutated into a different species. And yes, I equate that with your claim the ancients made up the same ability for species to mutate producing gods.
What is water when there is no movement of electrons? I realize that inert means a non-chemical reaction. I am talking about gas and matter without atomic reaction. Vapor is water that is not liquid. There has to be a lot of heat involved which would indicate motion, and atomic action. I think the introduction of light was an atomic reaction, and that is what the Big Bang was, except no one thinks that there was anything before, or a collapsed universe at a singularity point. If the whole universe was only light. That is an explosion. In Genesis it was not an explosion, it was just the jump start of atomic motion. The separation of light was not literal day and night as in the earth rotating near a star. The whole universe was light, then the whole universe was dark. That darkness lasted until the stars began producing their own light. The Hebrews declared that it was a day and night cycle and three times, as the sun and stars did not produce light immediately. The current cosmology says that it took a few hundred million years, before the first nebulae started producing light.
The days of creation as pointed out in Genesis have been hashed out several times already. There was a night and day, but during the day, there was no light, because no stars were producing light. If you want to gap the story and add billions of years of the universe being born over and over and over and over and over and over, it could get exciting, because that would be insane, or practical. We are back to it takes time to mutate from one form to another form.
Do you have proof of this, did you make it up, or just believe it because another person told you that? I believed that for a long time, until I started to actually read what the ancients themselves wrote, and it was not that long ago that I started to doubt it.
Berzerker
Deity
oh, I see what you meant by inert
timtofly
One Day
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I think the proper term would be nuclear reaction, but that only came to me after I posted.
I think the Hebrews claimed there was water before the "big bang". How it survived would mean that it was something other than liquid water. Otherwise the earth as a planet covered by water made it through the event. I guess it is pointless to speculate more, because you say this water covered earth preceded God, but not the universe.
One may as well say there was no need for God at all, which seems to be the default answer to the passage.
Once scientist started to put in mathematical terms the early cosmology, there is an aberration at the very beginning. There was also the thought that there had to be unexplained, and still unexplainable need for rapid expansion. If there was already matter including this usage of water before the big bang, then there may not have needed to be as much if any expansion until much later. But that is pseudo science because it goes against some agenda or concept that some refuse to acknowledge. It would also rule out the multiple universe as happening on it's own theory. Although the church claims that God will end the current universe and start all over at any given time.
Now the cosmology model has to include the addition of dark matter into the formula. That dark matter was there all along, or so it seems. There was light and then there was darkness. An equal amount of light and darkness from the very beginning. Even in the Psalms the Hebrews claim that God stretched out the heavens. I think that was more than just the separation of waters. Except that it seems the same term for water was used both before and after the addition of light. That aspect was lost when the Latin translation snuck in the concept of a fixed firmament. It was not fixed because it was firm, but because it was stretched out. That and the laws of gravity. They should probably not use the term "law" any more as that would indicate a decree made by an agent capable of setting up a decree, unless humans can take the credit for enforcing and conceptualizing the concept.
The Noah story (if you ever bothered to actually read it) is a clumsily fashioned fantasy. I'm not sure what your above response has to do with anything.
...you're assuming a historical event was described. That, however, is not the case.
Not really. The Greek word Theos is the same as Zeus. That's about all. It doesn't follow from that that 'the Greeks referred to God'.
That seems to be the jist of the Noah story. However, this never happened. There's a few simple reasons for that, of which the fact that assembling two of every species on Earth (?) does hardly guarantee survival of any of those species, seeing as their offspring will have nothing to mate with but themselves. That apart, any species that is reduced to two specimen is to all practical intents already extinct. Another reason would be the incredible size of the 'boat' Noah was supposed to build for all these animals. (We'll skip the amount of time needed to collect all these specimen, which would require Noah to visit all continents - including those which were unknown at the time.) Lastly, of course, there's no evidence whatsoever for any worldwide flood, which makes the whole story what it actually is: a moralistic fantasy.
Well, both theos and theoi are pretty regular terms in greek, both ancient and later. It refers to either one of the gods (and some argued for just one god, eg the eleatic philosophers with their perfect sphere god) or many gods.
Famously there was even the temple 'to the unknown god', in Athens, which apostle Paul made use of to try to speak of his religion to the crowd in the agora there.
That said, i am not seeing much of a similarity between greek and jewish religion. Nor between greek philosophers who were also speaking of some god (and not all of them do) and religious/apocryphal stuff in the jewish tradition. Besides, the two cultures were sort of night vs day in terms of conditions, society and just about everything else. If anything, jewish religion is a lot more apocryphal and OCD-based. Which does allow for interesting emotions in literature, but does not allow for a healthy attitude, imo.
Famously there was even the temple 'to the unknown god', in Athens, which apostle Paul made use of to try to speak of his religion to the crowd in the agora there.
That said, i am not seeing much of a similarity between greek and jewish religion. Nor between greek philosophers who were also speaking of some god (and not all of them do) and religious/apocryphal stuff in the jewish tradition. Besides, the two cultures were sort of night vs day in terms of conditions, society and just about everything else. If anything, jewish religion is a lot more apocryphal and OCD-based. Which does allow for interesting emotions in literature, but does not allow for a healthy attitude, imo.
Did you arrive at this date via a dart board? I'm asking, because in the bible I read, the stuff about the flood occurred many, many pages before the stuff about Jesus. Why are you reshuffling the plot?
You've been bending over in many different configurations to try to convince me that the flood was a historical event. Are you changing your mind again?
I'd go with the phrase "willfully obtuse."
What description - for entertainment purposes only?
I don't actually find this entertaining.
It's not easy when either of you post humongous walls of text that reiterate the same nonsense you've posted a dozen times already.
You don't seem to have understood my point that it was the oral tradition that was made up by humans in the first place.
It doesn't matter if you write it down, make graffiti pictures on walls, carve a stele, use cuneiform, paint a depiction on canvas, or type it into a computer and hit the 'submit' button on a gaming forum. None of that will make the original stories any less made-up by humans than they were.
You've been all over the place about the flood. Or don't you recall one or two other threads where we had this same argument? You grasp at pretty much anything, no matter how fanciful and ridiculous, just to attempt to "prove" that it really happened. You've changed your mind numerous times, so I really have to doubt your claim to use it as a "reference point" - because you can't make up your mind where you want that reference point to be.
What part of "Marduk was invented by humans and all the stories about him are just made-up stories" is too difficult to grasp?
I'm not the one insisting this. You're the one who thinks God makes special full-term babies in a laboratory and gives them to their mothers a few hours later. The most I'm prepared to concede here is that IF Jesus existed, he was fully human - had a human mother and a human father, and was in no way supernatural, divine, or any other such nonsense.
And I really hope you're not suggesting that Jesus should have mated with his siblings. That's something that was (and still is) taboo in nearly every culture in the world. The only exception I know of is the Egyptians, who kept their dynasties going (at least in some generations) via brother/sister marriages.
Could you rephrase this paragraph? It's not clear.
Which people, and what claim? You quoted several of my paragraphs, but it's unclear to which of them you're referring.
We're talking about reproduction and heredity. You just made the claim that Jesus was of a different species, which is ridiculous.
You completely missed my point. You said that light is necessary for liquid water. What happens when you have a tray of ice cubes in the freezer and the electricity gets turned off? The freezer doesn't work, and everything in it thaws. The ice cubes become liquid water, and this all happens without light.
This is ridiculous.
You're accusing me of making up something that anthropologists have known for longer than I've been alive? They made it up, just like the stories in the bible were made up, to explain things. Questions such as "where did we come from" and "where did the world come from" and "what are those twinkling lights in the night sky"... there's not a single culture on this planet that didn't ask these questions. However, instead of an honest "I don't know; let's figure it out," most of them just made up stories to explain the answers.
We have technology and the scientific method to figure out answers nowadays. But sadly, there are people who insist on clinging to ancient oral traditions that are only stories and are nowhere near reality.
You're going to have to show me where the phrase "big bang" occurs in Genesis. Really. I've read Genesis, and it's not there.
Not to mention, of course, that it's ridiculous to say that water existed before the universe itself. There wasn't any until oxygen came along - and that had to wait for the first generation of supernovae.
Berzerker
Deity
did the sun stop shining?
why did so many come up with the same answer?
those traditions describe surface water preceding the appearance of dry land and life - thats closer to reality than the "Hadean" theory of Earth's early history and it was scientists who came up with that idea not too long ago
its an interpretation of the "Light"
that depends on what preceded the big bang
Even if your freezer had a light (mine doesn't), it wouldn't work if the electricity was off.
The South Pole gets sunlight, but I don't see Antarctica melting every summer.
They didn't. My point is that while each culture invented stories to explain stuff, they were NOT the same.
Yes, some copied elements of older cultures. But others were quite different. They can't all be right, and not one of them has any evidence for why they think theirs is the correct version of events.
It's a modern "a-ha!" hindsight interpretation. The Hebrews didn't come up with either the phrase or the concept of the Big Bang.
Senethro
Overlord
This is like bible fanfiction or something. Not sure where the anti-science comes from though. I mean, if someone holds a canon of sacred text to be literally true then you can understand how someone could disbelieve evolution. But what is sacred about making it up as you go along with inspiration from what was on bad cable tv that week?
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