Evidence for the Biblical Record

thats a good idea. You go talk to the cat and i wont have to waste time repeating myself because you fail to read english properly.

i appreciate that this may be a basic point. I have only studied the alphabet and word/sentence structures thus far so my knowledge of hebrew is certainly not complete.However many scholars have read it as 'house of david' and many have agreed with them. So this is still evidence until it can be disproved with absolute cirtainty.

no specific date is mentioned in the account. Genesis 10:25 says that the confusion of the languages happened during ‘the days of Peleg.’ This would mean that it happened at some time during Pelegs lifetime. His birth was in 2269 bce and he died in 2030bce. So the confusion of languages happend during this 239yr timeframe or between 4,279-4,040 years ago. considering all known ancient languages began as pictographs, its a bit far fetched to say that they were completely independent of each other. If pictographs were being used by everyone, then its not impossible that it was because the sons of Noah, and in turn their children, used pictographs.Even acient chinese began as pictographic writing.

For Pete's sake, Apothecus, open your eyes and mind. It matches up nicely with the marks/numbers monetary techy a few verses later in the same end times apocalyptic chapter corroborating numerous other end time fulfilled prophecies and evidences of what we are observing today.Peg is great in some areas, but regarding prophecy interpretations, those interpretations, for the most part come spoonfed from liberal Jehovah Witness scholars who take it upon themselves to change the meaning of the wording to suit their falacious notion that they can spiritualize away observed reality.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Buz is great in some areas, but regarding prophecy interpretations, those interpretations, for the most part come from his own unevidenced assertions with which he wants to take it upon himself to change the meaning of the wording to suit his falacious notion that he can spiritualize away observed reality.So, the only way to now determine who is right, is by showing evidence. Got any evidence, Buz? Remember, assertion that something is so is not evidence. For example, you saying that this must refer to television, or asseting that the other prophecies must refer to current monetary systems, is not evidence that it is indeed so.

That's just not true, Huntard. I'm the one who has argued for the literal rendition of the wording evidenced by observed 21st century techy phenomena.Your refusal to acknowledge the evidence is a blatant unsupported blind assertion that evidence has not been cited.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

quote:

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That's just not true, Huntard. I'm the one who has argued for the literal rendition of the wording evidenced by observed 21st century techy phenomena.

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Now Buz, THAT isn't true. What you mean is that you INTERPRET the text as referring to modern technology, but there's nothing in there that demands such an interpretation or even strongly suggests it.So the Bible talks about people from many places viewing the body. That could happen in ancient times in a big cosmopolitan city without any need for television. So you would need actual evidence that it DOES mean television. For instance a reference to a television set, Or some indication that the foreigners were viewing the bodies from their own homes in their native cities. But you haven't got any of that. So all you have is an unsupported assertion.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

The literal text doesn't menntion anything remotely similar to television. Since alot of people have told you you haven't cited any evidence, but have done alot of asserting, I'm wondering who the the blatant denier here is, Buz.And once more, your interpretation is not evidence. I could just as easily claim that this refers to a time yet to come, where everybody has a personal broadcast device installed i their eyes, and they receive these signals across the entire galaxy. There is just as much evidence for that assertion as there is for yours. Why should we believe you are telling the truth here. You've got no evidence to show. You assert that what you say is true, you provide no evidence, however.

This is as irrevelant as the EvC rating system, Huntard, in which the biased concensus of the secularist majority POV consistently rates high,
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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

So, for you it's just an easy cop-out by saying "I did show the evidence!", when in fact everyone on this thread (including Peg), has said you haven't.Great debate tactic there, Buz. {ABE}: Got anything to say on the fact that the literal text doesn't imply television in the slightest?Edited by Huntard, : Added {ABE} bit

That's true - appeals to populatiry are logical fallacies.However, as has been stated, interpretation is not the same as evidence. I can certainly see where you're coming from with the "speaking image" reference to television, but that doesn't mean you aren't recognizing a false pattern. It's not a literal usage of terminology. It's widely open to interpretation, as Peg has shown from another Christian perspective.More importantly, it's not an observation,. It;s not testable, nor reproducible. You may find it personally convincing, but I see no reason to give credence to your interpretation of the text over Peg's, for instance. And I see no reason whatsoever to agree that yours is an example of fulfilled Biblical prophesy.

I might ask where you got those birth/death dates for Peleg, but it doesn't matter. If you accept an assertion (from whatever source) that this person existed and actually lived for 239 years, there's not much for us to argue about, since that sort of assertion lies far outside any sort of reality-based world view, IMHO. For the two of us to be on opposite sides in terms of accepting that as believable, well, that sort of brings an end to constructive debate, don't you think?In any case, despite that fact that the pre-Phoenician writing systems (Chinese, Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics) generally arose from pictographic origins, this does not lend any sort of direct support to your position regarding the "historical" nature of Babel story. To begin with, those precursors to Chinese writing were found in China, and had been there since long before the date range you've given us for the Babel story. People were already that far away from the Middle East before anyone "dispersed" from that tower.And of course there's Coyote's favorite evidence of continuous habitation in North America that spans (before and after) the period of time that YEC's attribute to the "global flood" -- which predated the Tower story by quite a bit, so those folks were already there in America when the supposed language cataclysm hit.Maybe you'd like to invent a theory about how the the confounding of languages was implemented over that sort of distance? But aside from contradicting the original tale, that sort of scenario makes even less sense: the people living in China and America (whatever language they were speaking at the time) would have had no involvement at all in building that tower, so why burden them with this linguistic affliction?Oh, well maybe communication was good enough in those days (despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to support this), so that there really was a global conspiracy to build that tower. Case closed, I guess. But still no evidence to support this "historical event", and tons of evidence that just don't fit with it, and defy any explanation consistent with the Babel story.BTW, just because the Chinese, Egyptians and Sumerians (who invented Cuneiform) all started out with pictographic notions for their writing systems, this does not in any way imply that they were all speaking the same language when they started to write. In each case, there was a natural and crucial development, whereby the pictographic symbols came to be used for their phonetic values, based on the words represented by the pictures, and not just their symbolic or pictorial values.To illustrate with a made-up example based on English, suppose we had a pictograph like this: "", representing the word we know as "boat", and another one like this: "\_/", representing the word "ox". We could then write about the new skin treatment we call "<_>\_/", pronounced "boat-ox" -- the symbols are used only to represent their sounds, in order to "spell out" some other concept that has nothing to do with the original "meanings" of the pictograms.Once symbols are used to represent sounds rather than concepts, the writing system becomes truly productive, making it possible to record anything that speakers of the language say.It is because of that development in writing systems that modern day linguists are able to theorize about the sounds of the ancient languages. And based on obvious differences in how their respective sets of symbols were used in combinations in each region, there is really no basis for assuming that the original writers of Chinese spoke the same language (used the same sounds for the same words) as the original writers of Sumerian or Egyptian. On the contrary, there can be no doubt that these were three very distinct languages already, when writing first came on the scene for them -- i.e. long before the date range you attribute to the Babel "event".OTOH, if you believe that someone named Peleg lived for 239 years, these linguistic details are bound to be of no consequence at all, because in your world view, fantasy counts as history, no matter what.Edited by Otto Tellick, : minor grammar repairEdited by Otto Tellick, : another grammar patch.Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

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autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Well, no. As a matter of fact, except for acknowledging that human beings speak more than one language, the Bible is utterly and completely inaccurate in its account of the origin of languages.The most widely accept theory dates the ancestor to the entire Indo-European language family to approximately 6000 years ago. This is supported by archeological and genetic evidence, as well as comparitive linguistics. There are competing theories, but none put the origin of Proto-Indo-European earlier than 5000 years ago.However, this doesn't account for all of the other language families, of which there are more than a few. Here's a map of the current distribution of language families. But Indo-European is only one of many different language families, each with their own histories and relationships. So even if you want to play make-believe for just a moment and pretend that the spread of Indo-European is somehow evidence that human language emerged from somewhere kinda almost close to the Near East sometime not really but almost just about 4000 years ago and that this proves that the Tower of Babel story is true, you still have to account for all of the other languages on Earth. How does your story account for the existance of 800 different languages from about 60 different language families just in Papua New Guinea? (Different families means that they're not related.) How about all of the hundreds of human langauge families around the world? Even if their languages were all created instantaneously back when Peleg was a pup, how exactly did all of their speakers get to their various homes around the earth in time to create all of their different cultures with their thousands of years of tradition and history?If you're looking for a possible ancestor to all human languages, you'll probably have to go back about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. It's entirely possible that Neanderthals were capable of speech. Is your Tower that old?Your folk tale has no factual basis at all. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

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I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.
-John Lydon

I notice by your map, if you look really close, there appears to be a shade of color in northeast Spain and southwest France different from the rest of Europe.I hope you realize that this color is not allowed in the Pegiverse.Edited by anglagard, : the yellow guy indicating the nature of the post

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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman RushdieThis rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. - the character Rorschach in Watchmen

yet its interesting that the Chinese character for ship is made up of eight people in a vessel. bit of a coincidence, isnt it? Especially if they 'apparently' had no contact with the people in mesopotamia before the language confusion. Edited by Peg, : No reason given.