Religion or Science - How do they compare?

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You've never actually defined what you consider to be Christian that I recall.

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Christianity is pretty broad, but nominal Christians like yourself don’t appreciate that. You are obsessed with dogma which really isn’t what Christianity is about at all.Whether liberal or conservative you really should understand that a lot of doctrine isn’t solidly nailed down, and condemning people for disagreeing with your favoured views isn’t Christian at all.

I’m saying that Christianity is hard to define because it includes so much. But that doesn’t mean that there are no limits.

Consider this Phat. If you have to accept a doctrine formed during the Reformation it be a Christian, there were no Christians before the Reformation.Remember that you are defending Faith when she says that refusing to accept the Penal Substitution view of atonement is is the same thing as being unable to embrace Christ and Christianity.Are you going to defend Faith on that point or admit that she is wrong ? Are you really going to say that the early Christians were unable to embrace Christ and Christianity ?

I was going to stay out of this but Faith just had to drag me into it.

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It takes deviousness and cleverness to write fiction especially for the purpose of deceiving people. They were ready to give up their Messiah so they had no motive, and the cleverness it would take to get all the parts together in a believable wa just doesn't describe their characters. I'm watching PaulK try to make use of this kind of deviousness and cleverness on the part of modern scholars to turn the true accounts of prophecy in the book of Daniel into a fiction

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There is nothing devious in honest scholarship. You are the one who has told obvious falsehoods, although they are so obvious they can hardly be called devious.

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His interpretation of the prophecies reduces them to a ridiculous triviality that no scribe would have bothered to write down, prophecies pointing to unknown people as "messiah" although the entire history of the OT points to the one Messiah the Prince who saves His people from their sins

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Because the coming of God to redeem His people and set up an eternal kingdom is a mere triviality to you. It didn’t happen, but that doesn’t make it trivial to the writer or to the readers.You just can’t stand the fact that the text doesn’t say what you want it to.

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All the "scholars" can accomplish is mangling historical contexts, making Daniel into a liar every time he says where he was when a certain vision came to him, removing him from the context of his service to the various kings of Babylon and Medea and Persia. You can't fictionalize reality without making a mess of it unless you are a novelistic genius and have decades to work on it.

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Of course my current series of posts says nothing about when the book was written or by who. But the author of Daniel didn’t do that great a job. He’d hardly need to know more than the succession of the kings and a few scraps of historical information. And he didn’t even manage to get it right there, as shown by the absence of Nabonidus. Daniel is not a long book and much of it is prophecy or stories that are unconfirmed by history. Daniel himself, for all his supposed importance is invisible to history - even in the Bible, there is but one possible reference to him, outside of the book of Daniel, and that seems to be a reference to someone who would have lived much earlier.