Christianity and the End Times

And they were bright enough to see the clue that the story is not to be taken literally. You, unfortunately, are not. And He can do it through more sophisticated means than talking animals.

I don't believe Long John Silver exists either. But if jaywill insisted that Long John Silver flew a balloon to Kansas in Treasure Island, I could point out that he was wrong. I was saying that the Hebrews thousands of years ago were sophisticated enough to understand that a talking snake was a literary device.

What makes you think they didn't have evidence-based thinking?

I, for one, don't consider myself to be an expert on the Bible. I was almost literally born in church and I could literally quote Bible verses long before I could read. I have read the Bible far more since I stopped believing it. It's worth more as literature that as a guide to life or reality.I do know my way around the Bible a bit and the Internet makes it easy to search.I could name several people here who are far more expert than I am. Some are Christians, some are not.

Your own perception (or intuition) of reality can certainly be deceptive. That's why human thought needs to be collaborative.

You have one community with one message but across the street there's another community with a different message. How can you evaluate the different messages? If they were rationally-minded people, why would they reject concrete evidence?

But the Messenger is the same. It's only the interpretation of the message that differs.That's why it's so foolish to put your faith in the messenger. You're really just listening to what you want to hear. You're accepting the interpretation that you're comfortable with.What you should be doing is comparing the message with reality and then evaluating the interpretations based on how well they correspond to reality.

When you're being mocked for saying foolish things, saying more foolish things may not be the best strategy.

double postEdited by ringo, : No reason given.

You have that backwards.

Sometimes it's hard to tell the con-men from the rubes. The con-man's greatest asset is the rube who truly believes.

You should try reading my post before replying to it. I didn't say anything about recorded sounds or the ISS.What I said was, "Sometimes it's hard to tell the con-men from the rubes. The con-man's greatest asset is the rube who truly believes." I was referring to your stance on the "end times".You can be either the con-man or the rube.

As I said, sometimes it's hard to tell the con-men from the rubes. Maybe you're trying to con yourself into believing in the easy-way-out Christianity that you preach.

The Bible is pretty ambiguous about whether the sins of the father should be passed on to the children. Exodus 34:7 says yes, Deuteronomy 24:16 says no, etc.

When you have a set of ambiguous statements, you can't just pick one and say it's unambiguous. That's cherry-picking.