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Author Topic:   Validity of differing eyewitness accounts in religious texts
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 183 of 305 (202819)
04-26-2005 9:18 PM
Reply to: Message 181 by Faith
04-26-2005 8:03 PM


Re: The importance/implications of Biblical history
No of course not, and how does this follow from my statement you quote where I say it is NOT all presented as witness accounts? Some reports such as the one you are bringing up were obviously handed down from generation to generation, perhaps rehearsed orally from one generation to the next, or perhaps even written down in some form or other, until they were incorporated by Moses into the Pentateuch.
so if this is all written down later -- why do we suppose, say, sodom is an eyewitness account? let's look at sodom, actually. one of three people could have written genesis 19 if it was eyewitness account: lot, or his two daughters? what about genesis 6-9? did noah write it?
if moses did, it's not eyewitness. eyewitness and divine revelation are different things.
Jews and Christians for 3500 years attribute the Pentateuch to Moses, both in the sense of its being BY him and about him. That should carry a lot of weight
yes. this is traditional, attributed authorship. it is dogma, nothing more. ask a reform jew if they think moses REALLY wrote the torah. and why should it carry any weight? the catholics have giant crucifixes and statues of the virgin mary. they use these in religious services, which breaks one of the first commandments. it's tradition, not scripture.
And there are many references to Moses' being told to write this or that down,
where and what, though? if someone after jesus said it, it had already become tradition long before that.
and certainly references to his receiving the law from God; and the delineation of the Law is the substance of a great part of the Pentateuch.
i'll agree to that part. this law is delivered to the people of israel by mouth -- maybe moses even has a written copy.
You demand a kind of authorship (literal pen to paper for every single word)
no, my point is exactly that this is NOT what happened at all. people on here all the time demand that this indeed was what happened. moses literally wrote every word in the torah, dictated to him personally by god, including the bits about his own death and speeches he wouldn't deliver until israel crossed the jordan and left him behind. -- in other words, parts of it had to be written BEFORE it happened. which would be great prophesy, i agree, but that's almost as bad as eddy penngelly's pre-hoc propter-hoc fallacy. (he was arguing for time machines and dvd players, not revelation)
and proof of authorship (a signed, witnessed and notarized signature or the like)
heck, it could be signed "with love, moses. ps: god says hi" and i'd suspect it still. but we're talking about the validity of witness accounts and authorship here. although, granted, being written in first person would help.
that is unrealistic and ignores the limitations and cultural conventions of the times.
exactly. what we have is a set of stories filtered by 2000+ years of editting, collected and pieced together in different fashions, from different sources. most of them original account were not written by people present, either, especially in the case of genesis. these stories may have been passed down orally for a long time, sure. maybe even from times contemporary to the events. but god himself did not personally pen the bible, and neither did moses or jesus. some stuff in there is bound to get distorted, changed, left out, added to, etc.
If you don't trust the text as written then you will simply have to believe it or not believe it without further evidence because that's all the evidence there is. If you need extra evidence then simply don't believe it. But why then keep bugging people who do believe it, simply because we believe the text as written? Simply saying "there's no evidence for this or that" ignores the fact that the written text itself IS evidence. It's simply not enough for you. So don't believe it. It's enough to convince me. And since there isn't any more evidence to be had, just stop nagging the thing to death.
yes, and this sometimes the case, i agree. for instance, the fact that egyptians have no record of it means absolutely nothing: they had no record of tutankhamen, either. it's not that they were BAD record keepers; they kept excellent records. they just would occasionally clean them out.
records, you see, aren't usually good enough evidence on their own. we have lots of records from the war we're in right now that say we're winning it with flying colors. and i'm sure we have lots that say we're losing it too. if 1000 years from now, somebody digs up our government records, and only find stuff on how well we did, would they have enough evidence to say conclusively that we won?
but, hey, maybe some israelites were in egypt. maybe a lot or all of them were. and maybe one day they got up and left, under the leadership of moses. and maybe they left nothing behind, no traces. it's possible -- but we have no HARD evidence of it, just a hebrew text written many years later that traditionalizes the account.
(and an egyptian record and archaeological evidence of a ruling class of semitic people in egypt called the hyksos, but i don't know if they were hebrew or not. if they did, the moses story is considerably backwards)
The historical events are a major part of the preaching of the Bible in Christian churches
cause christian churches are boring.
It's too bad if you miss the lessons in them. They reveal how God deals with ALL human beings - and nations- by showing it happening in the example of His relationship with Israel.
i never said i did. in fact, i think i've indicated in several posts before how i think that those lessons/explanations/examples are probably the fundamental reason behind the stories, and not the issue of whether they happened or not.
That's why all the reports of what the leaders of the nation of Israel DID are so important: You can trace their behavior and the consequences of that behavior.
yes, i rather like this idea. we had an old thread about lessons in genesis. go there and bump it back up, and we'll discuss. i'll warn you, i'm playing devil's advocate in that thread, so we can actually analyze whether genesis is trying to teachings, or if lessons can just be read into it in some places. however, i do like the idea, even if it is only interpretation. i think whether the authors meant it that way or not, maybe god did.
In other words, all these reports are ESSENTIAL to an understanding of how God operates in this world, how He deals with particular sins and righteous behavior both
there are two accounts i want specifically dealt with in that thread above, because they make me itch a little. one is the wife/sister thing that abraham does with sarah twice (and isaac does with rebekah once) and why god doesn't punish them for lying. i've heard an apologetic jewish answer, but i don't think it's right. (the lesson being "half-truth are ok, if it keeps your ass off the line." which of course, doesn't explain the isaac story, where it's not a half truth at all)
but i think i answered this question myself earlier today. if you have an idea, go post in that thread, and we'll move on to the next one. (it's a good one)
Throughout it all of course, God never completely abandons His people. The threats are tempered by frequent reminders of God's faithfulness and His future forgiveness and restoration of the people through the Savior Messiah He will send.
"savior messiah" is a bit redundant. the messiah they predicted would save them [from captivity] and reunite israel and judah under davidian leadership, restoring god's covenant with david.
but yes. and he sent prophets too.
See above. You are missing the whole point of the histories and the interconnectedness between all the events. You fragment it and so will never see the meaning of it all.
no, i take it apart so i can see how it works. it's like the engine of a car. i know basically how it work, and sort of what the parts are. but you get a much more detailed and rich understand of exactly how it works by breaking it off into its separate pieces. it wasn't made as one solid piece, but a bunch of little moving ones -- it wouldn't work otherwise.
my point above was the contrast an attempt at factual, event-driven history with traditional story-driven history. they are different pieces of the engine.
Neither do I. That's a long long discussion about why that book is bogus.
i believe we've had it before here. (mormons get offended faster than christian, on average). however, the point is that witness statements are meaningless. i'll give you another example.
autographs and signed memorbilia are very popular sellers on ebay. fake autographs, that is. and they always have a certificate of authenticity, ESPECIALLY the fake ones. no, i watch a lot of vinyl lp's relating to one of my favourite bands. and a couple of signed lp's popped up recently. now, i know what a real signature for frontman of this band looks like. it's pretty easy to spot.
these ones are fake. very fake. not only are they fake, there's three of them, and they all look really different. and every single one comes with a certificate of authenticity: a witness statement signed by a notary public saying they personally saw the person in question sign the item. these witness statements are meaningless: forgeries or errors themselves.
I don't get your point. Yes the Bible includes wisdom literature as well as history. I said somewhere that the historical parts are 50 to 80% of it, not the whole of it.
religion was a HUGE part of culture for many, many years in the hebrew nation(s). had they even been able to separate religious and secular, the same libraries would have contained both types of texts. the bible is a kind of library: it's the set of scrolls a church/temple would have had.
and so even later secular works (esther/ruth) are mixed in with religious works (psalms) or wisdom work (job) and most books are somewhat a mix of two of the three. even the histories present philosophical ideas. kings, for instance, STRONGLY favours judah over israel, and accuses israel of sinning for having a temple besides jerusalem.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 181 by Faith, posted 04-26-2005 8:03 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 189 by Faith, posted 04-27-2005 12:16 AM arachnophilia has replied
 Message 193 by Faith, posted 04-27-2005 12:13 PM arachnophilia has not replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 233 of 305 (203552)
04-29-2005 2:32 AM
Reply to: Message 189 by Faith
04-27-2005 12:16 AM


back on topic, sort of.
Well, if you were following what I said, the idea is that at the very least Lot's family would have passed the story down -- and Abraham and his family would certainly have known of it and passed it on. For whatever Moses didn't personally experience he had a lot of witness testimony that went before him to draw from.
sure. but there's a problem here. ever played "telephone?"
And the role divine revelation may have played in any of this in Moses' case is simply not known. He may in fact have received special revelations from God about events such as the Creation and the Flood. But we don't HAVE to assume this. It COULD have been passed down the generations.
in fact, what genesis is, even without moses, is a collection of traditional stories. these are the stories that had been told orally for god knows how long. there's even an indication that these stories existed in previous written forms. however.
that does not make them eyewitness accounts of real events. that makes it an account of a report of a report of a report of a report, etc, back possibly 1000 years or more, to something that may not have even ever happened. this is very, very different from eyewitness testimony. the people who recorded these stories originally weren't there. they'd just heard it from someone else.
this is essentially like internet spam. although copied fairly accurately, these rumors often prove to be nothing but bs. occasionally they are true, though. in the case of the bible, it's merely a faith issue, and not relying on actual eyewitness testimony.
Dogma is simply the codification of knowledge.
quote:
Main Entry: dogma
Pronunciation: 'dog-m&, 'dg-
Function: noun
1 a : something held as an established opinion; especially : a definite authoritative tenet b : a code of such tenets c : a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds
2 : a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church
dogma is the church's opinion, or established tradition. it's not just "stuff everybody knows." it's also rather consistently wrong. if it were right, perhaps it'd be scripture and not dogma.
It is valid only insofar as the knowledge it codifies is valid.
exactly. and usually, it is not.
Again, tradition, dogma, are only as valid as the knowledge they declare. There is nothing except modernist dogma, as a matter of fact, that opposes the tradition that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch.
well, academic scholarship does. but if you ask a reform jew, chances are they'd say something to extent of "traditionally we believe he did, but the indication is that he did not."
I don't take reform Judaism as a standard for anything of course. Like all liberal theology they simply throw out the supernatural because it doesn't sit well with their modernist preconceptions.
no, SECULAR humanist jews throw the supernatural out the window. reform jews do not. (btw, i do happen to think that jesus was probably the first reform jew. the ideas he expressed in the gospels are closer to reform judaism than christianity)
but i can gaurantee you that reforms jews do take their spirituality VERY seriously. they're just the equivalent of lutherans.
But you are being illogical. That some traditions / dogma are wrong doesn't make all traditions/dogma wrong.
they do when they are ignoring contrary scripture, and scriptural evidence. if dogma were based on the scripture it'd be called scripture. for instance, communion and baptism. while technically dogmatic practices, they are based on the scripture. that's not what i'm talking about at all. the tradition that moses wrote the torah is not scriptural.
Possibly scribes wrote it down from Moses' oral delivery. Perhaps he wrote it down himself later
the bits of the law and the speeches, sure. but the story had to have come from another source.
Well, that's too bad, obviously very bad argument. So THEY have this way too literal notion of what must have happened. Well, then, I disagree with them.
well, this is what i'm getting at. that view is just plain wrong, not to mention illogical. i'm basically just arguing for an extension of that logic, and a more realistic and accurate reading of the scripture, free of assumptions and dogma.
HOw about if it was literally written down by scribes more than by Moses himself, either from his direct dictation, or their memory of his oral teachings to the people
while, this appears to be the case with isaiah, et al. isaiah would have had followers (disciples) who would have collected his teachings and prophesies. later, bit of history from an established story (namely kings) were added to his speeches to give them context.
now compare with exodus.
The authenticity of Moses' authorship is usually questioned on the ground that other personalities appear to have written parts of it, but that's a silly objection to the tradition of his authorship. Even Paul 1500 years later had an amanuensis who wrote his letters for him -- most certainly by direct dictation and authorized by Paul himself in that case however.
right, but this is evidently not the case with moses. the bits the torah is composed of are quite plainly of completely different origins -- i mean, they even refer to god differently. which means that these texts probably represent different geographic locations, or maybe different dates of authorship.
Now THAT does not follow at ALL!
actually, it follows directly if you know the cultural conventions.
There is no reason whatever to suspect that it was not all written and assembled in Moses own time, at least within a short time after his death. It has been treated as such from the very beginning, by people who had the same fear of God Moses had, who would fear to tamper with such a writing.
actually, there is. it's got a lot of anachronisms that indicate a later date of authorship. a date at least 300 years later. some are aside mentions, posibly the result of an editor inserting something, but most are not. like i said, this is a two part case: 1. different authors, and 2. wrong time.
I certainly have never said God literally "wrote" the Bible, and that is really a silly idea. I hope no Christians have tried to defend that one.
you haven't posted here that long. stick around, every once in a while someone will try to defend that position. personally, i consider it blasphemy. i've seen the "problems" with the text. inaccuracies, typos, contradictions, inconsistencies, editting and translation error. and to say god's responsible for all that basically makes god out to be a crappy writer. a perfect being would not make mistakes. nor, if it was THAT important to him, would he allow mistakes to be made on his behalf. but don't get me wrong, i do think SOME of it is inspired by truths based on from the most high. i just think it's especially vague in nature, and filter by fallible human beings.
Moses however may very likely have written most of the Pentateuch personally -- this is very possible as Moses was raised in Pharoah's household where he would have learned all the arts and sciences of the day.
which, btw, would not include writing in proto-hebrew. moses, most likely, would not have known hebrew until very late in his life. but i will grant you this, the best single piece of evidence that some of the torah may have originated in someone educated in the egyptian royal class is that there is an egyptian word or two in the torah. when moses parts the "red sea" the word that's mistranslated as "red" is actually the egyptian word for reeds, like papyrus. so there's a hint that moses may have existed, and that exodus may have happened.
but this is of course far from conclusive. the text itself does not seem to have wholy originated in egypt, just the name of the place.
Jesus is never said to have written anything. He supports His testimony by witnesses.
jesus may have written something, there's nothing that says he DIDN'T. his followers (witnesses) would have written down what he said, yes. so speeches by jesus like the sermon on the mount may be fairly accurate. however, if these documents existed, they were only the source for the source documents used by the synoptic gospels.
That is what God did all through the Old Testament, appointed witnesses to His doings to write it all down and guided their writing by His Holy Spirit. That is how God "wrote" the Old Testament. In the same way we can say that Jesus/God "wrote" the New Testament though He did not literally pen a single word. He inspired His followers by the Holy Spirit to put it into words for posterity.
well, what god did was appoint prophets. these prophets collected disciples. and the disciples collected teachings. so if we have something in the bible that's accurate to the words of god (according to the prophets) it'd be books like isaiah and jeremiah. but kings is not one such book. nor is genesis.
There is absolutely NO reason to believe that "some stuff in there is bound to get distorted, changed, left out, added to, etc."
in genesis there absolutely is. these stories started their lives as oral traditions. and as i pointed out above, those get distorted. QUICKLY. just like in the game "telephone."
The fact is that the scribes were scrupulous in copying the text. I know PaulK kept challenging me on this, but it seems pretty reasonable to me to believe that if the Old Testament books we have today are identical in meaning to those found in the Dead Sea Scrolls from a hundred or so years before Christ, that scribal accuracy is VERY reliable, and why shouldn't it have been as reliable BEFORE the DSS as after?
this is a very good argument. and it's totally reasonable to assume that the text we have now is more or less faithful to texts at their last date of editting, or maybe even to their original drafts. however, these dates are also suprisingly late. as i said, genesis dates somewhere between 900 and 650 bc, and i have reason to suspect it's at the latter end of the scale. however, run with me on this one:
genesis is composed rather faithfully of existing documents. we know this because they haven't been rectified against one another. this is sort of like genesis at one point being a whole bible itself: j and e and p are all separated, we've just lost the separations. so here the errors actually give it MORE authenticity. which means we can extend each text back to it's last date of anachronisms. but that's about it. every indication is that before those dates, these stories were completely oral, traditional tales. which are not reliable witness testiments.
{{{{PaulK claims there were changes to Isaiah made before the DSS. This kind of stuff is based on modern destructive fragmenting "scholarship" that thinks it can determine historical events from scholars' own subjective speculations about the appearance of the text no matter what kind of nasty motives it slimes the people with who believe in it, and it makes me sick to have to deal with that kind of thinking, but at some point I may have to study it well enough to try to answer it. I have no doubt whatever that Isaiah has been intact since it was put together by Isaiah himself or soon after his death by scribes, just as I KNOW that Daniel was written when it says it was written and not a few hundred years later, which is claimed only because of the prejudices of scholars who refuse to accept the reality of prophecy. But this is a digression by now. There is absolutely NO evidence whatever for these things , just prejudiced subjective speculations.}}}
isaiah was indeed changed prior to it's inclusions in the dss. let's run over exactly what we have in the book of isaiah. isaiah has speeches, lots of them. textual evidence indicates at least two, possibly three sources for these speeches. not all of them appear to be the same isaiah, actually. and then interspliced with the speeches is text from kings. so even if you don't believe that there were two or three isaiahs, this historical bit was added after the speeches were written down, from an existing text. it's not a coincidence, or evidence of divine inspiration, that this text is magically exactly the same as an earlier existing text: it was simply copied faithfully for context.
so the model that we have for isaiah is this: isaiah gave speech and prophesy to the kings of judah and babylon. up to three sets of scribes wrote these speeches down. after his death, these speeches were compiled into a collection, and text from kings was added for historical background. in my opinion. isaiah probably faithfully renders the words of isaiah.
The problem with this thinking is that the records of the Israelites were written and compiled by men who had a deep reverence and fear of the God who had performed miracles for them and showed them His nature and powers and goodness, and those who had the responsibility for the scriptures treated them as sacred.
yes, you're absolutely right they did. except for maybe the miracles, because the indication is that most of these scribes existed well after god stopped performing miracles on a daily basis. although, they likely believed in them anyways, so the point is moot.
You cannot just assume they would have met with the same fate of neglect as ordinary human records.
they're still human records, even if they're religiously strict about them. you're basically relying on the idea that EVERYONE held the same ideas (something evidenced against with the bible, and the split kingdoms after solomon's death) and that no one had ulterior motives (something that can also be demonstrated against with the bible, btw). basically, everyone would have to hold them sacred in the same way. it'd only take one person to mess things up, insert text, etc.
but the scriptures remained in the temple in their same condition ready for the revival under Josiah for instance, when they were brought out and read to the people and national reformation was the result.
as i mentioned, josiah appears to have had ulterior motives. granted, getting rid of idols may have been a good thing, but every indication is that "idolatry" is the catchword thrown against enemies. he bashes israel for having golden calves, for instance. but judah had golden cherubim that served the same function.
Exactly right. As I've been saying over and over all we have is WITNESS evidence, the Hebrew text, probably written after years and years of oral rehearsal by the people and by Moses himself.
repitition several generations is not "witness evidence." it's a retelling ot witness evidence, maybe. but it is not witness evidence itself. and it's suprisingly unreliable. (actually, even straight witness evidence is rather unreliable)
And for all you know Moses did some writing during the wanderings. You don't know that he didn't. It is quite possible.
yes, but i'm fairly certain that what we have is not it. or a very, very filtered and degenerated version of it.
(and an egyptian record and archaeological evidence of a ruling class of semitic people in egypt called the hyksos, but i don't know if they were hebrew or not. if they did, the moses story is considerably backwards)
Sorry, I don't follow.
see, we DO have evidence from egypt that people from canaan were indeed there. almost at the same time most people place the exodus at, actually. these people were called the hyksos, and we have LOTS of evidence of them. pottery, records, houses, all kinds of stuff. they ruled egypt for almost 400 years, before they were expelled and chased back to the middle east. there's A LOT of debate as to whether these people were hebrew or not. personally, i don't know to make of it. if they were hebrew, then it turns the exodus story on its end. if not, it creates a lot of problems. why evidence of these people who kicked the egyptians' butts, but no hebrews who punished them with wonders from the heavens? these also would have been semitic people opressing semitic people.
Well, if they didn't happen the lesson is useless because the lesson is how God acts in REAL time and space, how God's law and will actually affect all of us, so it is crucial to their meaning that they in fact happened. This is God acting in REAL history. If you don't get that you really don't get anything of importance out of the Bible.
well, no. that's not right. look at the parables. is it important if they happened or not? or are they just there to tell us something?
At the moment I'm focusing on the history of Israel though. Genesis is another kind of discussion.
still, i think you might be able to contribute to that thread.
I'm already stretched way too thin, but maybe I'll at least take a look at it if you bump it.
will do.
You have no idea of the meaning of Esther and Ruth if you call them "secular." Esther is all about God's faithfulness in protecting His people even while they are in exile under pagan rulers.
i'm pretty certain that esther fails to mention either "god" or "LORD." i think song of songs does too. esther alos appears to be a borrowed story, obviously robbed of it's religious meanings. see, the name "esther" is suprisingly similar to the name "ishtar." this alone might be forgivable, but "mordechai" is also suspiciously similar to "marduk." so two coincidences with babylonian gods. and the king, who's name i can never remember who to spell, he's actually a real person -- he's king xerxes of persia. so they're putting a story about babylonian gods in a secular political context.
the irony is that a lot of biblical anti-pagan stuff is ripped right off pagan stories. the church kept this practice up. ever wonder why we celebrate jesus's resurection with bunnies and eggs? easter (also from ishtar) is a pagan fertility festival. we just wrote the christian stuff on top of it, to get rid of the pagan traditions. and it WORKS.
Ruth is a model of faithfulness to the LORD by a Gentile, giving a prophetic picture of God's future salvation of the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, as she leaves her homeland and attaches herself to the Israelites and their God. The picture is complete in her becoming an ancestress of Jesus Christ.
oh. there's a problem here, btw.
quote:
Deu 17:15 Thou shalt in any wise set [him] king over thee, whom the LORD thy God shall choose: [one] from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which [is] not thy brother.
quote:
Deu 23:3 An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the LORD for ever:
quote:
Rth 1:4 And they took them wives of the women of Moab; the name of the one [was] Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth: and they dwelled there about ten years.
quote:
Rth 4:13 So Boaz took Ruth, and she was his wife: and when he went in unto her, the LORD gave her conception, and she bare a son.
Rth 4:16 And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became nurse unto it.
Rth 4:17 And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, There is a son born to Naomi; and they called his name Obed: he [is] the father of Jesse, the father of David.
david is a third generation moabite, according to ruth. meaning, he would be allowed in the temple, or on the throne.
Nothing "philosophical" about that.
follow along.
If you were following the actual history carefully you'd know that God had decreed Jerusalem for His temple,
no, he decreed that the temple should be in ONE place in deuteronomy. and jerusalem had the first temples, so all others are bad. deuteronomy was "discovered" during the reign of josiah. in other words, nobody knew. samuels-kings and chronicles were all written AFTER deuteronomy was "found." the authors are putting forth the philosophy that god hates israel, but love judah because of this. and i can prove it.
there was a king in the norther kingdom who made alliances with foreign nations, king ahab. he marries jezebel (which kings HATES, mind you), allows foriegn temples, the whole nine yards. why did he do this? foriegn alliances. according to the records of king shalmanessar the third of assyria, he fought a war against this alliance, so we know who's in it. he reported how well he was doing, of course, but his position kept retreating further and further from israel, according to his annals. ahab and his alliance kicked his butt all the way back to assyria. --now, where is this in the book of kings?
there was a king who followed him from another dynasty, kind jehu. jehu fought to get rid of idols and reunite the two kingdoms. kings likes jehu, a lot. it mentions that his only folly was that he didn't rectify jeroboam's sin. but he dissolved this alliance, shut down all the foreign temples, trashed idols, etc. and as a consequence, when shalmanessar came back, jehu lost. badly. here he is kissing shalmanessar's feet:
now, where is this in kings?
they don't even mention either, do they? they don't contradict it, they just leave it out. because it'd be contradictory to their point of "god loves judah and hates israel." this is a bias in the text that has been know about since shalmanessars annals and that obelisk were found. and take note, we're not totally trust them against the bible. in fact, shalmanessar outright lied in his reports of the war. we know he lied because aside from talking about how well we was winning, his reported positions kept falling back. so it's not just one ancient text against the other.
so here, even the eyewitness account of the events is not so reliable, but it shows that bible's report is indeed designed to put across a sort of propagandic idea of who's right, and as a result leaves out some important facts. which is not very intellectually honest of the scribes who composed it.
This message has been edited by Admin, 04-29-2005 07:42 AM

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 189 by Faith, posted 04-27-2005 12:16 AM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 234 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 2:58 AM arachnophilia has replied
 Message 238 by Wounded King, posted 04-29-2005 12:20 PM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 239 of 305 (203702)
04-29-2005 2:37 PM
Reply to: Message 238 by Wounded King
04-29-2005 12:20 PM


Re: back on topic, sort of.
i dunno, could be a coincidence either way i guess. i'll look the up origins

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This message is a reply to:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 240 of 305 (203708)
04-29-2005 2:49 PM
Reply to: Message 234 by Faith
04-29-2005 2:58 AM


Re: back on topic, sort of.
That is exactly why I suppose Moses may very well have had divine help
but this is just a belief -- we could just as easily make the same claim about any text. anything from the epic of gilgamesh to the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. this would of course also include the quran and the book of mormon.
However, the line to Abraham was the "righteous" line, back to Shem, back to Seth,
according to the book. everyone is the hero of their own story.
and while many other human lines may have succumbed to the distorting factors of the telephone or rumor game, we might suppose that this line, that maintained more of a connection with the true God, did a better job of it.
this is kind of a game of circular logic. the book is accurate because the book says the people who kept track of it were. this is not the same as direct witness testimony, nor is the outside, unbiased records.
Listen, that is just too much of a post to expect one human being to deal with. Do you suppose you could boil it down to something manageable, like maybe ONE thought? In any case I have to mull over Percy's post before I get to yours.
it's ok. basically, the whole point of it is that bible's origins are a lot less than straightforward, and that as a source for history and accurate witness accounts it is quite unreliable. and furthermore that an accurate description of history/reality is not goal of the bible.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 234 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 2:58 AM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 241 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 3:00 PM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 245 of 305 (203766)
04-29-2005 5:51 PM
Reply to: Message 241 by Faith
04-29-2005 3:00 PM


Re: back on topic, sort of.
No you can't, not without disconnecting your mind.
well, that's exactly my point about the bible. here's all this stuff that's very, very convincing that it is not the direct testimony of the people involved, but later accounts distorted by tradition, external sources, oral repitition. they're inconsistant, contradictory, stylistically different, etc.
you'd basically have to IGNORE all of this stuff -- all the actual study of the bible -- to take on faith that it was given by divine inspiration.
There is every reason to think it of Moses but not of anything else.
i don't see any reason to think it of moses. i've heard a lot of "what ifs" and "maybes" and a few suppositions and assumptions, but no actual reason to think that this is not exactly what it appears to be -- a collection of traditional stories, religious history, poetry, and prophesy by multiple human authors. filled with flaws, errors, and contradictions.
and in fact part of it's authenticity comes directly from it's failure. any hints that we have that there *IS* witness testimony in the bible is from the bits where it doesn't line up. for instance, we know the prophesies that failed were probably real, but the ones that didn't we can't tell because they text is so anachronistic. could have been changed later.
as a contrast, if the book were all one book, one could very easily say "well, someone wrote it, one person. it's a work of fiction."
[admin: thanks. i'll try to keep it on topic.]
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 04-29-2005 05:52 PM

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 241 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 3:00 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 246 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 11:27 PM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 248 of 305 (203886)
04-30-2005 2:59 AM
Reply to: Message 247 by Faith
04-29-2005 11:28 PM


Re: Time for me to leave.
sorry to see you go, it's been fun.
[however, i have been considering dropping out myself, at least for a while. for a while this board got just plain nasty, and it was eating up a lot of my time and causing a lot of anger on my part. and so i just wasn't into it.
but it seems to have settled down. personally, my faith actually thrives on discussion. i don't really think about it much otherwise. so i'll probably be sticking around.]

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 247 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 11:28 PM Faith has not replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 249 of 305 (203887)
04-30-2005 3:14 AM
Reply to: Message 246 by Faith
04-29-2005 11:27 PM


one last reply, for old time's sake.
You and others here are demanding this idea of "direct testimony." The fact that it is written down IS testimony. It has not been sworn in a court or signed and notarized but it IS testimony.
well, the name of the thread is "eyewitness" and that doesn't normally means that someone might have seen it sometime a thousand years before the account.
It is presented as fact.
some is. some is not. for instance, claiming "song of songs" to be presented as fact is kind of silly. it doesn't even apply, it's poetry. sam-kings/chronicles ARE presented as factual account. genesis is not. exodus might be.
what you find inconsistent and contradictory is just you. Millions don't. Believers don't.
well, this is not really a democracy. people have known about these inconsistancies for a thousand years. in fact, i would argue that they knew about them when the compiled it. how do you not notice that in one part god is called "yahweh" and in another part he's called "elohym" and in a third part he's just called "el." my argument is that they simply didn't care. i don't really either, except that i know it's not just one source.
As we read it the whole is built from all these parts and it is extremely consistent. Stylistic differences are moot. It doesn't matter. There may have been different writers of different parts,
exactly.
but it is all Moses' story and all attributed to his overseeing authorship.
which is not actually true.
You are straining at a gnat as so many these days do. Once again, you have to simply read it believing it. When you do, it hangs together.
as would anything, i imagine. i could just read it idly, and ignore problems, but they're so interesting. i find the book interesting. i like it. i like knowing how it works. i'd rather appreciate it for what it is than what it's not.
Then I ignore it. Blissfully. What I get from taking it as written is indescribable spiritual wealth. Sorry you keep turning this gold into lead but that's the way it goes.
lemme run with your analogy for a second to elaborate my point. i'm just looking backwards and investigating. so,
suppose we start with a brick of solid gold. impressive, sure. shiny, yes. valuable, absolutely. special? not really.
now, imagine we find out this brick was actually made from lead. by finding this out, am i turning the gold into lead? or am i acknowledging that someone else somehow managed to do the opposite. and do we have more or less awe now that we know something really special happened here?
Yup, you don't see any reason for any of it. That's your problem with seeing, it's not the problem with the text at all. But this you will never see. I am truly sorry.
i see perfectly. because i'm not starting with any assumptions. remember, we have more in common than you might like to believe. what you are, i was. i read the bible the same way you do, or did. i had some problems with genesis 1 and 2, sure, but nothing i couldn't get over, and i whole heartedly believed every word of the rest of it in nearly literal manner.
my opinion comes from years of faith, thought, and research. i'm trying to see the bible for what it is, as part of my quest to see god for who he is. but it's not like i haven't seen your side of this debate.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 246 by Faith, posted 04-29-2005 11:27 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 251 by Faith, posted 05-01-2005 5:22 PM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 256 of 305 (204243)
05-02-2005 5:14 AM
Reply to: Message 251 by Faith
05-01-2005 5:22 PM


Re: one last reply, for old time's sake.
Absolutely not. As I have said before, where you are now is roughly where I was for most of my life. You could not have read it before as I do now or you would have had a personal relationship with the Living God as I do, and that you could not have given up to pursue such a killing thing as you are doing now. You are trafficking in conjecture and cynicism, not the truth.
you realize that this is nothing more than a personal attack on my faith, right? if i had thought you had a point here, i might have actually been really hurt by it, too.
my relationship was personal. and IS STILL personal. you know nothing of the things between me and my god. do not think for a second that you do. and if finding the truth is threatening to your faith, this is not my problem. i have already tried to explain how this actively part of my faith, and you have done nothing but use it as a weapon against me.
i am not the one here guilty of doing "killing things" and "trafficking conjecture." please keep it on topic, and out of my personal life.
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 05-02-2005 05:15 AM

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 251 by Faith, posted 05-01-2005 5:22 PM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 258 by Faith, posted 05-02-2005 5:20 AM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 259 of 305 (204247)
05-02-2005 5:34 AM
Reply to: Message 258 by Faith
05-02-2005 5:20 AM


Re: one last reply, for old time's sake.
Fine, then don't tell me I am where you once were, which is an imposition on MY personal life
i didn't mean it to be. it was a simple statement that once we would have had a lot in common, but i changed. i meant no insult, sorry.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 258 by Faith, posted 05-02-2005 5:20 AM Faith has not replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 273 of 305 (204534)
05-03-2005 12:33 AM
Reply to: Message 270 by Faith
05-02-2005 9:41 PM


Re: Prove it
Also, take up the question of Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan please. POint to writings about them.
i think part of the point of this is that writing alone, in isolation and contradiction to other writing, is not enough.
so i'll make the challenge even harder: point to something concrete.
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 05-03-2005 12:33 AM

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 270 by Faith, posted 05-02-2005 9:41 PM Faith has not replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 285 of 305 (204833)
05-04-2005 1:43 AM
Reply to: Message 284 by Faith
05-04-2005 12:08 AM


Re: My Summary
Not too bright there. I meant that YOU, personally, can't, and others of your general mental persuasion, not that ONE can't. I certainly can. I consider it easy to tell, for anybody with the basic smarts, feeling for character, etc.
not to sound crass, but you can't seem to identify the differences between history and traditions within the bible itself let alone in relation to anything else as already evidenced in this thread.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 284 by Faith, posted 05-04-2005 12:08 AM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 287 by Faith, posted 05-04-2005 2:07 AM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 286 of 305 (204834)
05-04-2005 1:51 AM
Reply to: Message 276 by mark24
05-03-2005 4:41 AM


Re: Prove it
Once again, the bible CANNOT verify itself.
perhaps this is going to found dumb, but why not?
we can tell what books were written with knowledge of other books. so when kings and chronicles say the same thing, no it's not verifaction. neither is it when luke and mark say the same thing. but at the end of the day, the bible is a collection of books, not just one. and the books in it are collections too. and the evidence is that they were NOT rectified against each other in the editorial and redactory process. so the fact that they agree AT ALL is sometimes suprising.

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 276 by mark24, posted 05-03-2005 4:41 AM mark24 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 288 by mark24, posted 05-04-2005 3:37 AM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 289 of 305 (204858)
05-04-2005 3:52 AM
Reply to: Message 287 by Faith
05-04-2005 2:07 AM


Re: My Summary
yeah, but this is a rather simple question of the ability to identify what is and what is not history, and what is and what is not witness testimony.
you claim the bible is authentic. and i agree, it's absolutely authentic for what it is, for the most part. we just disagree on what it is. i think it's what it appears to be: a book collected by hebrew people between the years of about 900bc to 200bc, and from 60 to 100ad by a different group of people, both regarding their traditions, partices, beliefs, and sometimes history.
i'm not sure what you seem to think it is. but it is greivous error to think that what we have on our bed-side tables is an accurate compliation of stories by the people who were there.
this is not an inability to judge authenticity on my part. i'm very familiar with the history, context, and structure of the collection. but you seem to be attributing some kind of false authenticity to it, making it more than it is. so that even (as with the other debate) mistranslations and changed meanings of words are divinely guided so that the things that are so obviously wrong somehow become right.
what sort of inappropriate tools am i using, exactly? reading comprehension and logic? the bible itself? i've only once here held it up to archaeology, in a case that proved a point that should have been obvious from reading the text alone: that kings is biased in favor of judah. you never answered that argument, btw, which rather conclusive showed that bits unfavourable to the bias were left out. but mostly, i'm just looking at what the text itself says. and if the bible is an inappropriate tool for judging the bible... well, i don't know where to begin.
so let's start this whole moses bit over again. tell me, what specifically makes the moses account more of a factual, eyewitness testimony, than say -- goldilocks and the three bears? no, seriously. millions of people can pretty accurately recite both stories. both are told as factual accounts, from non-present third person narration. both are refered to about the same way. amazing stuff happens in both (talking bears that live in houses). both are part of a cultural mythology, and the facts would seem to indicate that both stories are somewhat fictional.
now, i like to believe that moses was a real person, but that goldilocks was not. but, logically, what reason do i have to believe in either?

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This message is a reply to:
 Message 287 by Faith, posted 05-04-2005 2:07 AM Faith has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 295 by Faith, posted 05-04-2005 11:47 AM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 291 of 305 (204861)
05-04-2005 4:01 AM
Reply to: Message 288 by mark24
05-04-2005 3:37 AM


Re: Prove it
I was speaking specifically about Moses & the Red Sea parting, rather than the entire bible. We can only conclude that Moses saw the Red Sea part if we accept that Moses saw the Red Sea part. There is no other way of verifying the text. We are forced to accept it on faith.
well, it's recorded as moses being part of the cause. it would be a little more convincing as wtiness testimony if perhaps, i dunno, moses had chosen to write the story himself in first person.
however, in this instance, you are correct. after something like this becomes part of the cultural mythology, it's absolutely impossible for anything that refers to the cultural mythology to be considered verification of the factuality.
for instance, if i were to write that "the last song the string quartet played on the titanic as it sunk was 'nearer my god to thee,'" i'm not verifying that fact. i'm repeating the cultural mythology. maybe at one point i even watched the movie "titanic" or any number of other titanic movies that feature this commonly told myth. did it happen that way?
*shrugs* nobody really knows, apparently. and i'm pretty sure there are still some eyewitnesses alive too.
This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 05-04-2005 04:01 AM

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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 302 of 305 (204997)
05-04-2005 3:34 PM
Reply to: Message 295 by Faith
05-04-2005 11:47 AM


Re: Goldilocks
Well, but that's how I read it, and that's how it is taken by all the people I trust and admire, and that's how it has been taken throughout history. You've simply made it impossible to recognize the truth with all that studying you do about it.
and you don't think it's a problem that this notion of truth disappears when you look closer? that's like the "squint your eyes a little, and you'll see it" proof of intelligent design.
What is it that makes it possible to distinguish the history of Moses from Goldilocks? Basic intelligence would go a long way. Common sense. The ability to read.
yes, i agree.
Or maybe it's just one of those things where the ordinary human mind is SO fallen it can't cope with such obvious stuff, in which case we must rely on God's help. If you can't recognize the stuff of reality when you read it, God help you indeed.
but you've failed to demonstrate what factors should be recognized as reality. what makes moses different?
Again, C.S. Lewis did a great job of discussing how the Bible is so far from anything like myth it takes a special kind of blindness to have such an idea
ok, well we'll discuss a book by c.s. lewis's good friend then, the lord of the rings. the lord of the rings, like the bible is inordinately long, told from multiples perspectives, and (arguably) like the bible has a coherent overriding theme of a coming messiah. magical things happen, just like in the bible. so tell me, what makes the lord of the rings a work of fiction, and the bible a work of fact, other than the fact that we know tolkien wrote lotr?

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This message is a reply to:
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