Of course it isn’t how YOU think you think, that is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. The thing is, everything I said in the post is completely accurate.
If you knew this is how you are living your life then it wouldn’t be cognitive dissonance, and if it wasn’t for cognitive dissonance you would not be a literalist, pure and simple fact.
No, nobody can fail to be aware of the "cognitive dissonance." The dissonance doesn't make me a literalist, my being a literalist is how I resolve the dissonance. You resolved it yourself in favor of science. I resolve it in favor of God. So all your carrying on here is nothing but your insisting that you are right and I'm wrong.
We KNOW the scripture is true and EVERYTHING proceeds from that absolute knowledge.
But you don’t KNOW this, you THINK it is, you BELIEVE it is, and the reasons why you think it is because you have absorbed so much pro materials that you are unable to open your mind up to the possibility of accepting anything that contradicts your view of the Bible.
I started OUT accepting a ton of stuff that contradicts my current understanding of the Bible. I GREW into my understanding of the Bible. You are merely imposing your own prejudice on me. Your faith was too weak to survive your confrontation with science, mine is solid, perhaps because I believed all that stuff before I came to belief.
Answer this simple question:
What could I, or anyone else, show to you that would disprove something in the Bible?
Nothing whatever. You have NO idea all the ways the Bible has proved itself to me. You ask for paltry little evidences, but the proofs of the Bible are so beyond what I can tell you and you can imagine that your question is ridiculous. Someone whose faith is not very well grounded, who hasn't read as much as I have, heard so many different kinds of preaching on it, who hasn't lived its truths, may have a very low threshold for having his faith disproved. That was apparently the case for you and others here. It's not WHAT would disprove something in the Bible that persuades, it's about how much you have actually experienced its reality and know it's the word of God and are therefore willing (or unwilling) to stick it out through all the challenges you can't answer.
But, the fact is, for you to KNOW that the Bible is 100% accurate you would be required to be very well educated in a whole range of disciplines, from theology through to Syro-Palestinian archaeology, and no one, not even you has mastered all the subjects related to studying the Bible.
All those methods are nice to have WITH faith, but they are not at all required for knowing the truth of God's word. No, all I need is to trust God and take His word the way a small child would take his own earthly father's word, as the absolute truth. From that point God teaches His children more and more from His word. If you balk at it, you can't take anything in, end of teaching.
Another fact of the matter is that you will never learn even the basics of any of these subjects because to learn the basics requires someone to be open minded and to look at the evidence before they come to a conclusion. You will never grasp even the basics of, let’s say Syro-Palestinian archaeology for one simple fact, and it isn’t because you are not capable, it is because you will not study objectively, you will not read a wide range of materials. No one can grasp the basics of anything if they don’t look at the pros and cons during their introduction to a particular subject.
Just one insult after another.
You may believe that you have looked at arguments against your stance, but you really haven’t looked at that many because you leave far too many questions unanswered and show in certain posts that you don’t know the basics of a particular subject, yet you still declare that the experts are wrong because what they say contradicts the Bible!
That is correct. However, I've shown a lot more knowledge than you will admit to. But it's irrelevant. The Bible is not a man-made writing and as long as you labor under that delusion you will always be looking for God in all the wrong places. Except apparently you stopped looking long ago and now content yourself with endlessly proving to yourself that you made the right choice and viciously insulting those who made the opposite choice.
It is pure unadulterated ignorance Faith for you to turn around and dismiss someone’s life work, say someone like William Albright, a conservative Christian scholar who devoted so much of his life to excavating the Near east and trying his best to fit the Bible into an historical context, is completely and utterly wrong simply because you say so!
Oh dear, I've always appreciated Dr. Albright's work. What did I disagree with of his? I don't really need to know however. No human being can stand against God. If he contradicts GOd's word, he's simply wrong.
You have not got a clue about archaeology in the near east, yet the ‘Father of Biblical Archaeology’ was wrong about the date of the destruction of Jericho, or he was wrong about the date of Ai, or Lachish. But no, this guy has got to be wrong because you can click a mouse button and find a website written by some nutball who thinks he has refuted all the archaeological findings at Jericho in the last 140 years!
I'm sorry, I do not recall discussing Ai, Lachish or Jericho at all.
You should be ashamed of yourself, insulting the dedication and lifetime works of thousands of academics who have devoted their lives to clarifying the historical and social world of the Bible and to make matters worse MOST of these archaeologists were CHRISTIANS!
Sorry, if it contradicts God there's nothing more to say. You should be ashamed of yourself insulting God as you do over and over and over again. Also, if you are going to accuse me of such perfidy your own conscience should require you to inform me of the specifics of exactly what I'm being accused. I haven't discussed archaeology here.
Albright was a conservative Christian, as was George Wright, Callaway is a Christian, Dever was a Christian, Glueck was a rabbi, the list goes on and on. Why don’t you give these people some credit, why don’t you read some of their works, why do you dishonour their work by so easily dismissing their work without having a fraction of the knowledge or dedication that these people had? Now, I am not a lover of William Albright, the man was a bigot and a racist, but I have to take my hat off to him when I realise just how much work he did in advancing the knowledge of the ancient near east. But what you are doing is basically the same as a ten year old kid going up to someone like Bill Dever and saying Oi Bill, your claim that there was no unified military conquest of Canaan is wrong.
You are ranting wildly and I do not recognize one word of this diatribe against me. I have read discussions of Albright's work I have appreciated very much and you are out of bounds, WAY out of bounds. However, if he disagrees with God, which apparently is what you are saying, sorry, God wins.
You have made your mind up that the Bible is error free, despite the FACT that hundreds of thousands of CHRISTIAN scholars have shown exactly where there are errors in it.
I have not used the term "error free" and have not even discussed the concept of errors as such. You are making stuff up.
You cannot claim that the Bible is error free, you can claim that you BELIEVE it is, but to make an absolute statement like you have would require you to look objectively at the texts, and you are incapable of doing so.
Not at all, it requires me to believe God and all His faithful preachers over the centuries. If science contradicts it, too bad for science. You lack a solid ground for your position so you have to collect a million facts to make a judgment. The Bible is a solid ground and it judges the million facts.
This is not a matter of any of its being endangered, it CAN'T be endangered.
Faith, you are over 200 years behind the times, '
the Bible died in the 18th century. It doesn’t mean that it is a worthless collection of texts, it isn’t, but it certainly isn’t a perfect collection of texts when you take these texts out of their original context. The authors were not interested in recording accurate history, it was only in the 6th century BCE that anything resembling a critical history was being written by Hecataeus. The Bible is a minority report, it was written for specific purposes and accuracy of information was not high on the agenda.
Yes, people do get persuaded away from it by scientific claims, but it is THEY whose faith is weak, they lack faith in God's word,
BINGO! And here we have the confirmation. Faith worships her bible before she worships Jesus the Christ. Absolutely amazing! You continually put the Bible before Jesus, it is clear that you NEED an inerrant text because if there is one error in it then that opens up the possibility of more errors, and one of these errors might just be the resurrection of Jesus. I cannot imagine a weaker faith in God than you have.
Well I can. Yours. You can't put the Bible before Jesus. That is one of the most idiotic ideas anybody pushes around here. Jesus is ONLY knwon through the Bible. YOu CANNOT know Him otherwise and those who think they do are sadly deluded.
and it's very sad -- some just fold up in the face of the claims of science,
Well, Faith, in the real world, not the fairytale land that you live in, people normally side with the strongest evidence.
Your rudeness is sometimes breathtaking. You have no idea who I am or what kind of life I've had but you are willing to judge me anyway -- no respect for another point of view, no benefit of the doubt is there? However, that is correct, people do normally side with the strongest evidence, but I have evidence you know not of. AND Jesus explicitly said NOT to believe in what the world teaches, AND He explicitly taught that those who require evidence have the inferior perspective to those who have faith based on the testimony of His disciples.
For example, we know for a fact that people don’t live for 969 years, and the remains of thousands of excavated tombs and graves confirm that even a few thousand years ago humans were lucky to live for fifty years, then how can you blame Christians for concluding that Methuselah didn’t live for 969 years. No doubt you will have some crazy excuse for that one, let me see, is it because genes were purer then, or was there a different atmosphere then, or some other equally ridiculous excuse, I am sure there will be something. But, you see, that is all that you require, any straw to grasp on to at all is fine for you, it’ll do nicely, it doesn’t even matter if it has any support or that it even sounds plausible!
Look at the genealogies. There is a gradual overall decrease in the life span from over 900 down to our present "threescore and ten" over the first couple of millennia from Adam. Methuselah is simply the longest-lived in that reported lineage of men who all lived hundreds of years. It is all of a piece with the Fall, showing the accumulation of sin and its effects over the centuries. It has implications for the theory of evolution but if you insist that things now are the way they always were instead of being willing to learn from God's revelation you will never get it. And by the way, it is the RIGHTEOUS lineage from Adam through Seth that is reported. How long the life span was for the line of Cain is unknown. There is no reason to assume that ALL lived such long lives. The righteous Abraham and the righteous Job lived well over a hundred years, but we can't assume that the most idolatrous peoples maintained such a record. Death is the consequence of sin. The more death the more sin. The more sin the more death.
That was the point of Jesus' saying to Thomas that those who didn't need to see him were blessed. It's believing the testimony and NOT requiring empirical proof that's true faith.
But Faith, you spend your whole life LOOKING for empirical proof of the Bible events!
I do? Where are you getting that piece of nonsense? I'm looking for ways to present the Bible's claims, perhaps, and I'm looking for ways to show the problem with evolution. Otherwise I'm not the slightest bit interested in empirical proof of the Bible. Such arguments BORE ME TO TEARS as a matter of fact. I usually try to avoid them and only get sucked in when I think I have something to say on a particular point. But I'm trying to learn to resist that temptation too, because that kind of argument is tedious and fruitless.
Why else do you post so much unsupported crap in response to criticisms?
Because the basis of my position does not need that kind of support and the incessant demands for it here are tediously irrelevant and I often regret getting into that morass. I will engage on that level occasionally but mostly I really can't stand that kind of argument.
When faced with a problem such as the one I mentioned abut Jericho why don’t you just say that you have faith that God’s word is accurate and you don’t need evidence.
I don't remember one thing about Jericho. Perhaps I just skipped it because I'm impatient with your lengthy harangues, but if I skipped it then you haven't the slightest idea of how I'd respond to it if I cared.
I'm tired of your insults. I have no idea what you said in the rest of this post. I simply do not care. If you would like to try to be civil and boil down your concerns to something clear and manageable perhaps I will answer.
™ Version 4.2