What is the oldest religious text?

Hoaryhead, all of the references people have been using are referenceds to the first time the beliefs were written down. By that standary, the Torah, along with it's Genesis account, are not as old as the writings of the religions mentioned.Your derived date for Creation is just that - a derived date, not the verified date of the oldest text found.If I write a book that describes the world 2 million years ago, does that mean the belief is 2 million years old? Certainly not.All that can be proven is the age of the texts themselves. By that measurement, we can see that the Genesis story is by no means the first written religious text. The source of an argument is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if the "encyclopedias were written by atheists." All that matters is the evidence, and you have provided none.Do you have any evidence that the Judaic texts are older than the Hindu Rig Veda, or the Egyptian religious writings? Do you have evidence that the religious wall paintings made by the Australian Aboriginees are not 50,000-80,000 years old as others in this thread have claimed? And can you make a single post without making an ad hominem attack? Well, if the Aboriginal writings are indeed 50-80,000 years old, that would pretty much disprove the 6,000 year old Young Earth, wouldn't it?As to the rest - the age of writings cannot determine the age of the Earth, except that obviously a text cannot be older than the planet itself. Your comment here is off-topic and irrelevant to this discussion.

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

Hoaryhead, your entire post is irrelevant to this discussion. Mathematically deirving dates talked about in the Bible is not what we are discussing. We are discussing the age of the texts themselves. As in, the age of the paper they were written on. The date these ideas were first written down.We are not talking about the ideas themselves. Just because one book talks about events 4000 years ago doesn't make the text or even the belief system 4000 years old.Yes, the beliefs may have been held before they were put into written form - that's not an unusual occurance. But the only way we can get a real date out of a belief system is to measure the age of its oldest text, whether it's the Torah, the Rig Veda, or Aboriginal cave paintings.Please stop repeating yourself. We all heard you the first time, but your "mathematically derived" dates are not relevant to this discussion.Oh, and by the way - math is only as accurate in an instance like this as its root assumptions. If any of the dates you used from the Bible are incorrect or the events you used as a starting point never happened (ie, the Flood), then all the math in the world is irrelevant.

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

You think a global Flood caused the petrified forest?! This is a decent description of what caused the petrification of the trees. It's written more towards a wide audience, so even kids can understand, but it serves the purpose.It was a geologic and chemical process that took a longer period of time than you believe the universe to have existed! Certainly not a Flood that never happened!

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

hoaryhead, you're posting gibberish that is totally irrelevant to this discussion. Either post something about the age of a Biblical text being older than any other religious text, or conceed and be quiet. I for one will ignore you until you actually post something on-topic and backed up with evidence, and not filled with ad hominem attacks.If you don't do this soon, I'd put money on the Admins giving you a little vacation from posting.

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.

Wow, that didn't take long

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Every time a fundy breaks the laws of thermodynamics, Schroedinger probably kills his cat.