The Atheist Experience

Gosh that WOULD be simple, but only a complete idiot asks for the impossible, and the work of textual reconstruction is excellent, which only an intelligent person can appreciate.

I've seen the evidence reconstructed. They compare all the existing fragments with each other, determining as far as possible which wordings were scribal errors, which were copied from which, and how many of each of the variant wordings exist, among other things, and they really are able to reconstruct the original wording that way. Your dinosaur comparison is utterly irrelevant and silly.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Genuine science works with the available facts, you are asking for something that isn't science.In fact, if your definition were true, and we need to have the originals for science to be possible, then there is no way at all for the sciences of the old earth and evolution to be authentic because all of that has to be reconstructed from very few available facts, as we can't study what actually occurred in the past.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And I've proved that you are wrong.End of discussion.

That information is very well known so your dismissal is simply perverse. The page I linked to the Blue Letter Bible covers it, but there is also a Got Questions page on the subject which says that they have determined the copies to be accurate.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, you have some sources of your own I guess, they certainly aren't the ones I trust. There should be no reason for an Aramaic version of the NT that I know of, it was written in Greek, and while fragments of many translations exist I don't see why an Aramaic translation would be of any importance one way or another.The Textus Receptus is the best compilation of manuscripts as attested by all the scholars I trust.If you want to read the best scholar on the subject in my opinion, read Dean John William Burgon, "Revision Revised" and "The Last Verses of Mark" and he's written many others.

Sheesh, jar, the comparison of thousands of fragments of manuscripts isn't something you can sum up in a sentence or two. But the bottom line is that MOST of them are identical, and that is a strong clue that they are accurate copies of the originals. The discrepancies are usually copy errors and it takes work to track them down. Sometimes they get copied into long sequences of copies, sometimes they got corrected along the way by other scribes. It takes expertise to figure out these things. But the bottom line, again, is that most of the text is identical through the many fragments and that allows them to say that they were accurately copied from the originals.

Moses, the author of the Torah, was the adopted son of an Egyptian pharaoh, educated at court, not a goat herder. Paul was a highly educated Pharisee, Luke was a physician.I lived your idea of "reality" for most of my life, milord, and I know truth when I see/hear it. Much as I appreciate the human mind as a magnificent creation that in itself proves the existence of God and the stupidity of evolution (a weird invention of that very mind), I also know it is fallen and can't tell the difference between its own fantasies and spiritual reality .. or any kind of real reality for that matter.Cheers.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm pretty sure he was a shepherd in Midian, was moving the flock when he encountered God in the burning bush.But he had been brought up in the Egyptian court and didn't get driven out to Midian until he was forty or so, at which point he became the herder. Before that he had lived the life of an educated member of Pharoah's family.

Ah well, another predictable victim of "modern scholarship" which is the real revisionism that believers know intuitively is bogus but seems to enthrall those with an agenda to discredit what they don't understand. No, the Bible is to be read as traditionally understood before the "scholars" got their hands on it: as the revealed word of God to men who had the fear of God in them that would not have permitted any such deviations as the scholars impute to it. They even made some of their decisions about its timing based on their own prejudice against prophecy and other supernatural revelations -- not how any true scholarship should operate.It was preserved through the dedication of such Godfearing men and is to be completely trusted as is. Moses was real as were all the others who are described in it and had a part in writing it. Very simple: just believe it as written, the lying scholars aren't going to be able to "stand in the judgment." Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

To review the point I made before, Moses was a prince in pharaoh's court and highly qualified to write down what his Hebrew family had taught him during those same years. When he heard God speaking through the burning bush during his years in Midian he had confirmation of what he'd been taught and knew he was in the presence of the Creator God. You look at that in your determined disbelief of course and dismiss it as a hallucination, and not even a hallucination since Moses doesn't exist according to you, but I digress.But we who believe he was real and that it was really God who spoke to him in the bush and sent him to confront Pharoah, have the wonderful benefit of having been rewarded for our belief. You don't get rewarded unless you believe, which is why all your skepticism is only going to keep leading you in more circles of skepticism. The instruction isn't all that hard to follow and if you gave it a cincere go you'd find out that God is real. Scared to find that out?But I digress.The point I wanted to make is that this isn't a religion of goat herders, it's the religion God Himself revealed, truth not made but revealed. He could have continued to speak through burning bushes and it would still have been the religion that God Himself gave us, not the religion of burning bushes. In any case He inspired Moses to write down the evidences for His existence and character, and all you have to do is believe it. SO simple, just believe it. Your disbelief has no foundation except what seems reasonable by your own judgment. an idea that springs from the fallen human mind and has no other source of validity. Yes just a silly notion that gets dreamed up in your fallen head, and yet it has the power to keep you from discovering the truth, which you'd discover if you followed the simple rule: believe it as written. No, not just any old thing that is written, only what is written between the covers of what is called The Holy Bibie. You really do like the vaporings of self-inspired truth-manipulating "scholars. There's nothing deserving of your credence in what they say but somehow they exert this strange power over you and others. I'm SO fortunate that I started out with such silly ideas, so that the truth could come in and overthrow them. They seem to have ossified into an impenetrable lump in your head unfortunately. if you sincerely tried believing even a small part of what the Bible teaches you would discover amazing things, but as long as you insist on the basis of absolutely nothing but your own prejudice that it isn't true you will never learn the truth.This is not a religion invented by people of any sort at all, not goat herders, not zealous followers of a teacher, it's the truth given to us by God Himself.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Moses' life in court would only have given him an education to set him apart from "goat herders," that was my only point. He also spent time with his Hebrew family in those first forty years of his life and clearly learned the Hebrew language.As for all the supposed languages in fragments of the OT, forgive me, milord, but I strenuously doubt your "facts" cuz I know you get them from sources I would dispute. They are a bunch of self-serving charlatans who are KNOWN to make up stuff about the Bible. As for the languages imputed to the original texts I doubt it, that's all. Prove it.As for the fragments of manuscripts I was only addressing those of the Greek NEW Testament, of which there are 5300 going back to the tenth century. they have more fragments in Latin and other languages, but I was talking about the reconstruction of the original New Testament texts only.As for the OT I'm not up on the textual criticism at all in that case, but I do know that when the OT texts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls are compared with our own current Hebrew text they are identical.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Googling the question of the languages got me only the information that Genesis and the whole OT were written in "classical Hebrew' which is an ancient form of the language, with the exception of parts in Daniel and Ezekiel written in Aramaic.The fact that the Dead Sea texts are identical with ours was unexpected.-------------Stop trying to find excuses to reject it. It says simply: believe. All the scholarly reconstructions are subject to all kinds of errors. The Jews preserved the manuscripts carefully, regarding them as God's word. Google doesn't show different languages but even if there were there would be a reasonable explanation for it. Just believe.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That's crazy. It either is or it isn't.Christianity is.

OK I won't bother to say anything more to you on this subject. That should make you happy.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.