Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> In article <web.47595d5f922777ebf48316a30@news.povray.org>,
> 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
Looks like something is missing here. If you think Jesus said it's okay to beat
servants I'd like to get the verse, because I don't remember such a thing. He
did mention a master beating a servant, but that was in a parable.
>(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.
Yes. That was the evidence in the eighteenth century. Some progress has been
made since, you know. Like the Nazareth Inscription
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazareth_Inscription). Or Pliny's letter to
Traian.
> 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.
Yeah, right. Now you're asking for God as testable hypothesis.

> 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.
If I wasn't using the web-view, I'd sig this. "Hey, the sun has the same colour
of the sky, except for a key element". Arf. Sorry, couldn't resist.
About Noah, I've read a site making a case for the Indian origin of Abraham
based on all the similarities between their myths and the Hebrews', including
Noah. Can't find the link right now.
<snip>
> 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.
Really? So language cannot prove itself, can it? Therefore let's burn
dictionaries. And math? Can it prove itself? So let's add math books to the
pile. Considering Science is based on published papers, that consist of math
and (usually English) commentaries, I think you just killed Science.
> 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.
Ever heard of peer review? It works on popularity among peers. Man, if you're
trying to take science out of the picture you're doing a good job. <_<
> 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?
I seriously doubt that Buddhism is second. Islam allows four wives, BTW. Kind of
an unfair advantage. ;-)

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