In article <web.47595d5f922777ebf48316a30@news.povray.org>, 
nam### [at] gmailcom says...
> Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> > So it influenced human history. So what. So did a lot of things. That
> > doesn't mean it didn't influence it *wrongly*, or that its prevalence,
> > mostly via violence, war, subversion, threats, torture and assassinatio
n
> > (directly or via its acceptance by those that both believed it and used
> > such tactics), makes it somehow better than other alternatives that
> > *could* have happened.
> 
> war, assassination, threats and torture are not the teachings of Jesus or
 any
> other religious leaders AFAIK.  They have nothing to do with religion exc
ept
> some men in power will make other men (not them!) die in the name of God 
to
> justify their needs.
> 
Sorry, but while that may be true of the NT, its ***not*** true of the 
OT. And even Jesus accepted such things as slavery, declaring to one man 
that beating his servant (And yes, in the context of the times and that 
passage, the person being beaten was not a "paid" servant. You where not 
legally allowed to beat people you hired, only those you owned.), so 
sorry, but insisting that its not what Jesus taught isn't all that 
relevant. Not the least because you have to first convince me that such 
a person existed, where the only evidence for his existence amounts to 
the NT, and a few vague statements made by people who, at best, quoted a 
similar name in reference to some event, and which, like the NT, only 
suddenly became important enough to "find", or invent, some 50 years 
after the fact.

> > By your logic, had a
> > few key moments in history been different, you would now be sitting her
e
> > arguing that our Emperor really is a God, and that he is a direct
> > descendant of dragons, because it can't be otherwise and there still be
> > a Chinese empire.
> 
> Except it wasn't different.  There must be a good reason for that.
> 
Yeah, its called chance. If you want to imply otherwise you first have 
to provide evidence that divine intervention was needed to make that 
happen, not human action.

> > Its even worse, given the fact that you can trace virtually **every**
> > story in the Bible back to some prior religion, and that not one of
> > those religions believed in the same God that the Jews eventually
> > insisted was the real one, and many of them believed in ***multiple***
> > gods.
> 
> I believe Adam and Eve and even Noah's times were much farther off than i
n the
> Biblical accounts.  Oral tradition existed for far longer than recorded H
istory
> counts.  Many people through the ages were aware of these histories passe
d
> along, it's not really surprising that many cultures recorded their versi
ons of
> the distant events.
> 
Noah was based on Sumerian legend, its virtually impossible to argue 
otherwise, unless you simply want to insist that somehow they wrote a 
story that was 100% identical, save for a few key elements. Everything 
is there, the sin committed (though by Gilgamesh, not the world in 
general), the loading of animals on the ship, a far more believable size 
of the ship, which could easily have been exaggerated by people that 
realized it was too small to fit the Noah story into, 40 days and nights 
of rain, the **known world** being flooded, and every things else. The 
only thing that doesn't fit is the, "God's chosen built a big boat to 
save all life, while God drowned all the sinners!" The reason for that 
is obvious. The Jewish people wanted God to punish a sinful world of 
greed, and all the other things, while the original story had God 
punishing Gilgamesh for it.

As of the whole Adam and Eve thing. We know that humans where reduced to 
a few thousand individuals back when the last super volcano blew. Prior 
to that, it would have seemed like paradise, after, they would have 
struggled to survive in a world where many of the plants and animals 
around them where struggling to survive, or dying, as the ash plume from 
the volcano dropped the planets temperature by a huge amount. Its not 
impossible to imagine two people making up some crazy asses story about 
being thrown out of paradise for eating the wrong bloody fruit. It also 
provides a *reasonable* explanation for where all the other people, 
including the wives of Adam and Eve's children, came from, they where 
other people that wandered, seperately, out of the "paradise" they had 
lost.

This makes sense, and we have evidence of it. All you have for your 
version is the same BS you get from Atlantis advocates: "Well, it must 
have happened way back farther than anyone has looked, so like, we just 
haven't found the evidence yet."

> now why did God made a covenant with the Hebrews and not with other peopl
e, say,
> the Greeks, the Chinese, the Africans?  It could be said Moses and his pe
ople
> are direct descendants of Abraham and Noah and they were the righteous me
n that
> God spared from the Flood, but I really don't know God's intentions.  I k
now
> eventually the covenant was far broadened via Jesus salvation and thus
> available to all people in the world.  It's a mere question of faith.
> 
Sorry, but you are starting with the assumption that a covenant **was** 
made, then asking the absurd question of why what you haven't proven 
happened only happened for the Hebrews. This isn't how science, never 
mind logic, works. You have to prove something happened *first*, then 
explain it, not make up a mess of explanations for why it did happen, 
then insist that because you have a lot of excuses for why it makes 
sense to you, it is therefor real.

And the stupidest part of this backward logic is that you again bring up 
Noah, which even Biblical scholars now admit (you know, the people that 
actually study history, instead of just listening to priests babble) was 
probably based on Gilgamesh.

> other than that, the divine is felt differently by people of different cu
ltures.
>  You don't see, nor hear God with your physical senses and thus it's all 
left to
> personal interpretation...
> 
In other words, you think that the divine felt differently about 
different cultures, want that to be true, so you are defending this idea 
with the claim that the Bible explains this to be true, which is somehow 
supposed to validate the original premise. It won't work. The Bible 
can't be accurate unless it describes what you claim, so until you can 
provide evidence that it **is** true, other than the Bible, the Bible 
can't be used as proof of the original premise. Your using it to prove 
itself. You can't do that. Such proofs require than you provide 
*external* references to events it describes, to indicate that those 
events took place at all. The problem being, the more we learn, the more 
inaccurate and absurd many of its descriptions of events become. Heck, 
they can't even get the time of Exodus right, which recent archeology 
indicates took place some 500 years **earlier** when neither the 
pyramids, nor the great temples, that Moses' people where supposed to be 
enslaved to work on, had even been imagined, let alone built.

And even if you prove times and places, which it invariably fails at, 
your argument that God was involved in it is based ***solely*** on the 
presupposition that because a lot of people believe in your God, this 
validates the idea that *he* was involved somehow. Its argument via 
popularity, not evidence. And you **still** lose even then, since 
****world wide**** Christianity is only the *third* most popular 
religion. Islam is #1, with, I think, Buddhism coming in second. Since 
you can't even claim, correctly, that you have the *winning* religion, 
how do you use that as evidence that your right, and the other, 
probably, 4 billion people in the world that think you are a fool, are 
wrong?

No, the only valid claim you can make is that you believe because things 
happened the way they did. Any attempt to claim that this was ordained 
or helped begs the questions, "What *real* evidence do you have for 
that?", and, "Then why is Christianity the third most followed religion, 
instead of the *most* followed?" Your evidence for the former is 100% 
circular, relying on, "it happened, therefor it had to happen, qed, I am 
right!", while I very much doubt you have any explanation for the later, 
which doesn't undermine your own claim that God has to be on *your* 
side, otherwise you wouldn't be a Christian.

Oh, and the stupidest thing about your argument is that, while the US is 
irrationally insane about religion, and so is the ME, the rest of the 
western world tends to broadly reject these very arguments, and most of 
them have given up on the idea of God you claim to follow, in favor of 
atheism, or at the very least, a form of deism, in which *god* has not, 
and never did, intervene in the world, beyond his initial creation of 
it. So, technically, your version of Christianity probably isn't even 
the third biggest religion anymore, but probably like 10th or 11th.

-- 
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    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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