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Author | Topic: Biblical Eugenics - being wrong about how to colorize your goats | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
The branches are not sparkled spotted or streaked they re white. lol. Remember: read, think, research, read some more, think some more, then post:
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member
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CS, please don't talk to me like I'm an idiot. Then stop acting like an idiot.
I have a bachelor's degree in applied science.
I have also studied the bible since I was about 10 which is roughly 22 years. You must be doing it wrong, because you've argued against some very basic Biblical concepts - like saying that Jacob wouldn't con somebody when he tricked his own father.
FYI: main stream thoughts are always changed. So you denegrate main stream thought, but you hail yourself for having a bachelor's degree But whatever, it doesn't matter because I'm done arguing with you. You've admitted that you're not interested in supporting your arguments with evidence, and that is what we expect aroung here.
quote: Yeah well, fuck you and your "tac". I'm not playing that game.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
After all of that stuff, why even entertain twisting the Jacob/Laban story for the purpose of making Jacob out not a conman. Alias has admitted his motivation: He doesn't want to bother with actually figuring anything out, so he just posts whatever bullshit he thinks up and lets us do all the leg work for him.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
Try for helping me break down your wittle op claim. Huh? That doesn't even make sense. They must be just giving away those Bachelors degrees these day... Anyways, regarding the claim in my OP, that Jacob used the wood planks to affect the coloration of the offspring, I don't see that you've even bothered to come up with an argument against it.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member
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I'm not Catholic, but my guess is that they might vary somewhat, but not clash. You'd be surpised.
While that sentence specifies only Jacob's "relations", I think it could also sum up the belief that scientific details from Biblical times could have been different from scientific details that are observed happening today. I don't see it saying anything like that at all. But how would that work anyways? You're saying that back in the day you could affect the offspring with pieces of colored wood, but now today you cannot? When did the change take place and why?
Of course the scientific community believes that any natural law they discover hasn't changed in any way for millions of years, Law are defined into place. Force equals mass times acceleration because that's how we've defined 'force'. The fact that its the product of those two, as opposed to the difference or whatever, is an undenyable fact. It doesn't matter what time period you're in, the law is the law. Other things we've discovered, though, are known to have varied over the milenia and we even know by how much they've changed.
but much of what is recorded as happening in Biblical times doesn't agree with that, the really long lives of people such as Moses, Abraham, Isaac, many others as only one example. That's because the Bible gets some things wrong.
Even the scientific community has to admit that things used to be different on this planet than they are today. Sure, like 400 million years ago the days were only 21 hours long. But a few thousand years ago, things were not different at all.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
Maybe I would be, if I was shown any proof at all of your claim. What? How would you have me show you proof of what some priests told me when I asked them this question?
The change took place about 90 A.D. (when the Bible was completed) God can do things any way he wants, I see. I would've been nice if he told us and didn't lead us to think otherwise. So, to recap: Your position is that when this story took place, you actually could affect the offsping of your animals by having them mate in front of colored wood. But, as of today, we cannot do that because God changed the world in 90 AD when the Bible was completed. Is that about right? Now, if what an animal is seeing during mating used to affect how their offspring came out, don't you think that would have a drastic effect on the animals' evolution? Why has God hidden all the evidence of it from us?
That's because the Bible gets some things wrong. Just some things, or everything, according to you? Well, I mean, it says some right there in what you quoted
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
You said earlier that you hadn't asked any priests, and I suspect it's because you don't know any priests. Oh, well I do. And I went throught 12 years of Catholic schools, so I've met many priests over the years... even some of those spec-op Jesuits that some protestants are on to. Their beliefs vary by a significant amount, to the point that "clashing" is inevitable. Outsiders of Catholicism seem to think we're all just programmed drones or something. We actually have a decent amount of diversity.
If you just quoted me two conflicting answers from two different priests, I'd probably believe you, especially if I could confirm what they said by doing internet searches to find similar patterns within Catholic beliefs. Well I already quoted and linked you the Catholics position on the matter, so I don't really see any reason to interview priests.
marc9000 writes: The change took place about 90 A.D. (when the Bible was completed) God can do things any way he wants, I see. I would've been nice if he told us and didn't lead us to think otherwise. No, by listening to Christian scienctists who arrived at that conclusion after following where the evidence lead. We have empirical evidence that suggests that no such change took place, and we don't have any empirical evidence at all that it did. That leads us to think that it didn't happen. If it really did happen, then we've been hoodwinked, and that wasn't very nice.
That's pretty close. Ok, I've got the jist of it then.
Now, if what an animal is seeing during mating used to affect how their offspring came out, don't you think that would have a drastic effect on the animals' evolution? No way to tell, because I don't know how you're defining the term "evolution" in this particular case. I'm talking about how the animals have changed over time. All of our evidence suggests that the changes have been due to genetic mutations that are random with respect to the fitness of the animal. That is, that what the animal is looking at during mating does not have an affect on its offspring. We also lack any evidence that such thing is even possible, and no conceivable mechanism on how such a process could work. The only way that it could have actually happened, was in a way that has been deliberately hidden from us.
Why has God hidden all the evidence of it from us? I have no idea, but (as scripture says) his ways are sometimes beyond human understanding. So then do you conceide that your position in this debate has God tricking us into thing that the Bible is wrong in this case?
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
I believe there's a lot of diversity within the Catholic church, but I'd like to see how much diversity there is on only this particular issue, that is, if the Bible is wrong in this particular case, concerning only Genesis 30; 37-40. Typically, the amount of diversity is proportional to how vague the dogma is. In this particular case, the dogma is really vague, so I'd bet we'd get a whole range of positions on this particular one.
So I was wondering what priests would say when directly confronted with the eugenic part of the story. If you don't want to check on it that's fine, let's just go with what you said above (message 99) if they would say it was just God's will and the wood didn't have anything to do with it. Isn't that much different than saying the Bible is wrong? It is. A priest who wanted to maintain an inerrant Bible would probably go that route, but one who wanted to be honest about it would probably admit that its just an error.
What I'm wondering is if we have some strong evidence that you were programed out of your religious education as a child by an atheist bent science education as an adult? How does typing about what priests might say provide evidence for me being programmed? That line doesn't fit there at all. Did you throw that in there later, or something?
So some Christian scientists believe that the Bible is subject to being authenticated by human scientific endeavors? Absolutely. It'd be silly to just assume that it got everything right and then not ever bother checking to make sure.
They didn't find this in the Bible of course. I"m also wondering where non-Bible believing Christians get their information about Christianity, if not from the Bible. From out in the real world. We can test the information in the Bible to find out what works and what doesn't. Helping others works. Selling all your stuff doesn't. You'll even find Bible-believing Christians that figured out that they aren't going to make it very long if they get rid of all their stuff. So they don't.
So Moses parting of the Red sea - hoodwinked? Jonah spending some time in the belly of a whale - hoodwinked? Christ's virgin birth - hoodwinked? Christ's resurrection - hoodwinked? All these things are not scientifically "possible" according to today's scientific community. Certainly an almighty God can do all sorts of "impossible" things. When the Bible says that God was directly involved in a particular miracle, I have no problem going along with the story. But in this particular case with Jacob, not only is God absent from direct involvement, the story tells us why the outcome was achieved: its a purely materialistic explanation where the stripes on the wood are what caused the offspring to be different. That's why its an interesting case. If you want to say that God was involved, then the story is misleading. If you don't want to say that God was involved, then the explanation in the story is just plain wrong.
So your belief is that God can do something only if scientists can understand it? No, but doing things to the world leaves behind evidence. Your claim about what God did would have left evidence of it happening. The only other option is God purposefully hiding it from us. And that is deception.
So you have a requirement of God that he makes sure not to hide anything from us? Where does this requirement come from? From the idea that he's generally a pretty good guy. A guy that wouldn't lie to us about what he's having us see.
No, my position is that atheist scientists have tricked you into becoming one of them. But I'm not an atheist...
Since you believe the Bible is wrong in some cases, do you think that God is a trickster? I think people have put to much weight into his "authorship". An all-knowing God, who was also honest, wouldn't tell us that you can colorize your goats by making stripes on wood and having them mate in front of it.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
So this thread is to question whether a particular passage really did get something wrong or not. If we're just going to assume that the Bible is God's word and therefore it cannot be wrong, then we can't even begin to ask the question. Or if you do assume that, then you need to reconcile the passage with reality.
Your reconciliation is that things were different back then, and that leads us to a god that is deceiving us. If you're fine with that, then I guess that's that.
It is. A priest who wanted to maintain an inerrant Bible would probably go that route, but one who wanted to be honest about it would probably admit that its just an error.
I don't think "honest" is the right word, when a priest compromises so much of what scripture says, to the point where he places more trust in the words of men than in the word of God. What better word is there than "honest"? That's exactly what it is. Blindly accepting an assumed premise isn't honesty, questioning your beliefs and testing them for accuracy is.
Typing that the Bible is wrong is what provides me evidence that you may have been programed. Ah, I see. But that's just based on a false dichotomy: that either you fully accept the Bible is God's inerrant word, or you've been programmed by atheists. There's plenty of grey between those two extremes, so the lack of the former is not evidence of the latter.
Once Christianity is reduced so far that it's subject to scientific approval by humans, (prohibited at several places in the Bible) then there's no source of absolute truth, That's a good thing. Because what if your source of absolute truth is actually wrong about something? How could you ever know without testing it? You'd just go on believing a falsehood. And if you just assume that its true, you're never going to get past it. Having a source that you think is absolute truth only hinders you from discovering the real truth. The truth is that you cannot affect the offspring of your goats by having them mate in front of colored wood. The Bible tells us that you can. If we never tested it, and relied solely on the Bible for absolute truth, then we would be thinking something is true when its not.
because human opinions of just what's right about it and what's wrong about it are never going to agree, especially when enthusiastic atheists are part of the process. You say "especially" but what follows is irrelevant. People are going to have different opinions whether or not atheists are part of the process. I mean, here we are, two Christians sans atheists who disagree about what the Bible is saying.
That's what Catholic-scientist Kenneth Miller says. On page 258 of his book "Finding Darwin's God", he says this;
quote: He's actually claiming that nature shows us more about God than the word of God does Well sure. Men wrote the Bible, God wrote nature. I like this quote from St. Thomas Aquinas:
quote: yet atheist scientists like Dawkins, Stenger, and many others claim that the same nature that Miller studies shows us that there is no God. It's logical that these two views would really be at odds with each other, that there would be a flurry of debate between these two beliefs. Well, there are debates about that. But also, in the grand scheme of things, its not something that really comes up in our day-to-day lives, so I wouldn't expect there to be a whole lot of noise about it.
Is there, of course not, these two views UNITE against some political views of creationism, even though neither of them have complete scientific explanations for the origins of life. I believe that God created the world, so in some sense that makes me a creationist. But I also realize that the way the Bible says it happened isn't exactly the way it happened. Its not a uniting against the belief that God created the world, its against the idea that because its in the Bible then it must of happened exactly that way, regardless of what nature reveals to us is what really happened. Blindly assuming the Bible is inerrant doesn't help us any of us at all.
If Miller (and you) have the most basic knowledge of the seriousness of the conflict between science and religion, The conflict is only with some religions, particularly the ones that require the Bible to be inerrant.
the importance of what God (through the teachings of Jesus) expects his followers to do concerning setting examples, spreading his word, and opposing Satan, then your zeal for downplaying the importance of scripture just doesn't pass the smell test. Your smell test needs to be calibrated. Just because I downplay the importance of scripture doesn't mean I've been programmed by atheists to oppose religion. That's just a false dichotomy you apparently believe in.
But in this particular case with Jacob, not only is God absent from direct involvement, the story tells us why the outcome was achieved: its a purely materialistic explanation where the stripes on the wood are what caused the offspring to be different. That's why its an interesting case. If you want to say that God was involved, then the story is misleading. If you don't want to say that God was involved, then the explanation in the story is just plain wrong. Of course he was involved - if you think that's misleading, it's because you're making the mistake of putting it to a secular test. That's the purpose of this thread, though. To question whether a particular passage really did get something wrong or not. If we're just going to assume that the Bible is God's word and therefore it cannot be wrong, then we can't even begin to ask the question. Or if you do assume that, then you need to reconcile the passage with reality.
I think people have put to much weight into his "authorship". An all-knowing God, who was also honest, wouldn't tell us that you can colorize your goats by making stripes on wood and having them mate in front of it. That's as far as we can go on it, I just think things were different in Biblical times. Then you're still left with a god who is deceiving us.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
Your reconciliation is that things were different back then, and that leads us to a god that is deceiving us. If you're fine with that, then I guess that's that.
I have to admit that I just cannot follow this line of argument. According to marc9000, the Jacob sheep genetics story was written back during the time when sympathetic genetics actually worked. If that is the case, why in the world would the story contain any reference to modern genetics? If, in fact, no part of the Bible was written during the time of modern genetics, and that seems to be marc9000s position, how would any description of modern genetics appear in the Bible? Quite frankly, I find marc9000's explanation a bit dubious. But I don't think the 'God is a deceiver' line of argument works here. I explained my reasoning in Message 167:
quote: If sympathetic genetics used to work back in the day and modern genetics did not, then science would have discovered that to be the case. The fact that the world that God gave us tells science a story that is contrary to what is laid out in the Bible, is where the deception from God would enter. So the deception would not be in the Bible, it would be in the world as we see it.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member
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How would science have discovered that CS? The same way we discovered that mutations are random with respect to fitness. We'd just have different data that told us that the environment can affect mutations.
Sympathetic genetics is magic and thus it need not leave any impression on a sheep's DNA. No, I don't accept that. If the animals coats changed then their DNA had to have changed. And according to the story, it was the mating in front of the wood that caused the change to happen, not magic.
And we cannot look at those old sheep now to determine that their phenotypes didn't match the colors that their DNA says they should have had. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that God did not magic up some sheep millenia ago. That's not the scenario I'm under the impression that we are in. The scenario is that the world was different back then so that the mating environment could impact the changes that happen to the offspring. Not that God directly intervened in this particular case.
Once magic has been invoked all bets are off, and what marc9000 has done is invoked magic. But his magic is a change to the whole world, such that things could have happened back then that don't happen today. I'm saying that we would have evidence of this (unless it was hidden by God himself), and that since our evidence suggests that the change has not taken place, then either way we are being deceived.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
In the OP I quoted Genesis 30, here's the longer version:
quote: My understanding of the story was that Laban was going to give Jacob the, I'll just call them "colored", colored animals from his flock as a wage. In order to cheat Jacob out of the wage, Laban removed the colored animals from his flock so that Jacob would get nothing. Then, Jacob used the colored pieces of wood to have the non-colored animals breed colored ones so that he would actually get a wage. I read it as saying that seeing the colored wood is what cause the animals to have colored offspring. Now, if we look to the next chapter, Jacob has a little more to say about the situation:
quote: Well, for one, that does have God being involved in the whole thing so this outcome of colored animals could be just an act of God. With just the section from chapter 30, there's no mention of God directly intervening. But further, it seems to be suggesting that the male goats that were mating were already colored ones. That would be the source of the colroation as opposed to the wood causing it. It really doesn't paint a clear picture though, and its rather confusing. The colored goats were removed from the flock, but could the flocks still interact with the non-colored ones and reproduce? Does anyone else want to take a shot at interpreting what is going on in this story?
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
But further, it seems to be suggesting that the male goats that were mating were already colored ones. That would be the source of the colroation as opposed to the wood causing it. I don't see any support whatsoever for this interpretation. Gen 31:10-12
quote: The male goats that were mating were colored. Maybe the wood planks were just to draw the colored males over from Laban's flock to Jacob's, or something?
Perhaps it is time to move on to another Bible story? I don't have this one figured out yet.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
I think the issue is that what Jacob says in chapter 31 doesn't appear earlier in the story and seems to be at odds with it. Right, together the story doesn't really add up.
There is another way to explain that. Jacob was lying. And I think that's the answer. We know that Jacob is a trickster-type. We know that it would be perfectly easy for the author to use Jacob's explanation from chapter 31 instead of the story we do get. So why didn't he ? Why is the author's version of the events so different from Jacob's ? I think that Jacob is saying that God did it to cover up his trickery and justify his claim to the animals. It's the sort of thing that he would do. You know what: I think you're absolutely correct. Jacob did use the wood to make the colored offspring. But when it came time to explain to Laban's daughters how he had gotten his flock, he was all: "Er, I had a dream, and uh, God made it all happen, yeah, that's how it went down". So yeah, that makes sense. He was just covering his ass. Thanks Paul!
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
The other possibility is the one given by Jar regarding other Biblical stories. There are plenty of these kinds of inconsistencies in the Bible. Those mixups might well result from the stories being told over and over again by different people. Sure. I think we should expect some mix-ups and convolutions and things like that, although, on the other hand, if we're talking about the direct word of God then you'd think that stuff wouldn't be there.
The truth of the matter is that it really does not matter much how the sheep gained their color. Yeah, not so much for the bigger picture, but I think the author did think that you really could affect the offspring with the environment.
What matters is that the result was supernatural. Here's where I disagree. The story, itself, describes it as a natural process using pieces of wood. And that's why I brought it up for the literalists, because the natural process it describes is now known to be wrong.
Quite frankly, marc9000's belief that the breeding was natural and not supernatural makes Jacob even more of a trickster. I don't think making Jacob a trickster is a problem for him.
I'm not sure why he prefers it. He's trying to maintain a literally inerrant Bible.
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