How the Bible Actually Works

GOD could give you evidence if you would park your brain long enough to trust Him.

If God gave you a brain, then he meant for you to use it -- not to park it.

PhatI WILL quote him directly. This is the Book Nook Forum...not the In Your Own Words Forum or the Science Forum.

All of EvC is the In Your Own Words Forum. Percy has told you so himself.

Again, if your heroes are making sense, you should be able to explain them sensibly.

Phat writes: Well, what else would they play? Pink Floyd is the obvious choice.

The artists are easy but the song selection not so much.

I'll start a thread on it as it's the season of merriment.

jar writes: I can and do know that ALL of the evidence shows that if GOD exists it is not any of the God(s) or god(s) found in any of the so-called religious literature including the Bibles. That is a conclusion Phat supported by ALL of the evidence.

I await examination of this evidence with bated breath!

So let me get this straight. You have evidence that if God exists, (I am assuming this includes Jesus as God)this means God/Jesus is unlike anything ever taught or written about Him. Same with Coyote, Raven, Bunny, Armadillo, Spaghetti Monster, and Allah dat other human malarkey.

My reply to the content(s) of the book will be in my own words, if that's what you mean. The books should be coming next week. Let's be patient.

Phat writes: You have evidence that if God exists, (I am assuming this includes Jesus as God)this means God/Jesus is unlike anything ever taught or written about Him. Same with Coyote, Raven, Bunny, Armadillo, Spaghetti Monster, and Allah dat other human malarkey.

Phat, there is absolutely NO evidence for any GOD other than human created stories.

We have absolutely no way to even guess what GOD might be like based on ANY evidence.

We do know that the Bible characterizations of God and god and Jesus vary from story to story which is evidence that what is written is the creation of the author, editors and translators.

The above holds true for any and every God(s) and god(s) that have ever been discussed in any format.

What I am saying is that there is no more validity to any description of Jesus that there is of Raven.

You've been shown the evidence and reasoned argument a brazillion times.

If GOD exists we cannot say anything about his characteristics that has any validity.

If God exists we can say anything about his characteristics with equal validity; and of course, humans have done just that.

That's why every single religion is equally valid and every single god, Raven or Coyote or Jesus or Ganesha, is equally valid.

Edited by jar, : fix sub-title.

If so, then all that you really believe in is yourself. (and evidence)

It does not matter if the Episcopalians have you on their roster.

Based on what you yourself said, all religions are just human-approved clubs anyway.

I have my evidence and it is internal. You always ask me how do I know it is God or Jesus....and I say why don't you ask Him?

Just because you never park your brain at the door does not mean that others, many of the great men of faith had no problems surrendering.

We have absolutely no way to even guess what GOD might be like based on ANY evidence.

That's another problem with you science-minded humanists. You assume that either everyone understands and gets it or no one understands or can do so.

Salvation begins at an individual level. Not everyone will know. The evidence is internal.

We do know that the Bible characterizations of God and god and Jesus vary from story to story which is evidence that what is written is the creation of the author, editors and translators.

Were the stories all written at the same time? Why do you rule out progressive understanding?

Edited by Phat, : No reason given.

Phat writes: If so, then all that you really believe in is yourself. (and evidence)

No Phat.

Stop misrepresenting what I say!

I don't believe in anything that has evidence; I form conclusions based on the evidence.

I don't believe in myself.

I do believe that there is a GOD and that I will be judged after I die.

Phat writes: It does not matter if the Episcopalians have you on their roster.

You joke?

The fact that I am a Christian is very much supported by the reality that I am a registered member of a recognized Chapter of Club Christian.

Phat writes: Based on what you yourself said, all religions are just human-approved clubs anyway.

Almost. All of the evidence shows that religions are just human creations.

Phat writes: I have my evidence and it is internal. You always ask me how do I know it is God or Jesus....and I say why don't you ask Him?

Try thinking Phat.

Tell us how?

Phat writes: Just because you never park your brain at the door does not mean that others, many of the great men of faith had no problems surrendering.

That's true and supported by the fact that there are thousands of different "True™ Religions™"

Edited by jar, : appalin grmmar

Phat writes: Salvation begins at an individual level. Not everyone will know. The evidence is internal.

Don't you think it just a little bit questionable that the internal evidence that you have is what you've acquired from the culture that you've been born into? Was that just lucky?

Phat writes: Were the stories all written at the same time? Why do you rule out progressive understanding?

Why do I rule out typical carny snake-oil tactics?

Mainly because "progressive understanding" is simply yet another truly silly sophomoric self-serving dishonest methods of conning the rubes, palming the pea, fixing the deck, misdirecting attention tactics used by all conmen and card-sharks.

Stop and think Phat.

Look at the examples.

Review the evolution of the "Great Commission".

I dismiss it for the same reason I don't buy lottery tickets, read horoscopes, ask the Ouija board or trust what the "Magic 8 Ball" says; I'm not that gullible.

And of course, the stories were not all written at the same time and it's likely that all were also revised to meet the needs of the period politics and dogma as well as the needs of the various Christian Cults.

It is simply more evidence that it is all just the product of human invention.

Phat writes: I have my evidence and it is internal.

Nope. You don't get to have your own evidence. (How do you think a jury would work if each member had his/her own evidence?)

Phat writes: Just because you never park your brain at the door does not mean that others, many of the great men of faith had no problems surrendering.

Surrendering isn't about parking your brain at the door.

Phat writes: ... many of the great men of faith had no problems surrendering.

I presume you mean Gautama and Muhammad.

Phat writes: Salvation begins at an individual level. Not everyone will know. The evidence is internal.

You contradict yourself. Evidence IS what everybody knows.

jar writes: Stop misrepresenting what I say!

I don't think he is misrepresenting what you say. I think he's demonstrated over and over that he's not capable of understanding most of what is said, by you or anyone. I think that's why Ringo felt it necessary to note the importance of Phat expressing Enns' views in his own words instead of just providing excerpts.

--Percy

Replying to all your messages here:

Message 31:

Phat writes: God Himself is the evidence which you reject by definition. You limit Him to evidence.

Surely you knew even as you wrote this that it makes no sense.

Message 35:

...(changed and humbled)

This is how you see yourself? Well, the changed part, sure. But humbled? You've become increasingly and aggressively irrational and arrogant over the past couple years.

So far my "evidence" is quite shoddy and inconclusive.

This isn't quite accurate. Your evidence is non-existent.

GOD could give you evidence if you would park your brain long enough to trust Him.

Seriously? The Tinkerbell argument?

But then again, you don't even know which one is the real God.

As has been said many times, the only difference between you and an atheist is that they believe in one less god than you.

Or maybe there is a slim possibility that you do, but just like to argue and challenge others to think. I certainly don't think that Satan has you just yet.

Maybe Santa Clause has him right now.

Message 39:

I WILL quote him directly. This is the Book Nook Forum...not the In Your Own Words Forum or the Science Forum. What do they feed you in Saskatchewan anyway?

What I think Ringo is saying is that we can't be sure you understand what Enns is saying unless you put it in your own words. None of us here want to argue with misinterpretations that you never articulate. That's why rule 5 exists. By the way, you can get a head start on reading the book because most of the first chapter is available online: How the Bible Actually Works

Message 49:

So let me get this straight. You have evidence that if God exists, (I am assuming this includes Jesus as God)this means God/Jesus is unlike anything ever taught or written about Him. Same with Coyote, Raven, Bunny, Armadillo, Spaghetti Monster, and Allah dat other human malarkey.

And this is an example of why it's imperative you put things in your own words. Jar's words were right there in front of you and yet you didn't understand them. His meaning is along the lines of something that's been said here many times, that where so many claim to be right (hence his twice referring to "ALL of the evidence") most likely all are wrong. (I see jar explained his meaning in greater detail in Message 51.)

Message 52:

I have my evidence and it is internal.

Oh, yeah, that'll work. If no one else can examine your evidence then it's worthless.

You always ask me how do I know it is God or Jesus....and I say why don't you ask Him?

So when jar asks God, how will he know it's God? Should he ask you? That would at least be neatly circular.

Just because you never park your brain at the door does not mean that others, many of the great men of faith had no problems surrendering.

So many sects of so many religions, and so many great men "surrendering" in each sect of each religion. They can't all be right.

Message 53:

We have absolutely no way to even guess what GOD might be like based on ANY evidence. That's another problem with you science-minded humanists. You assume that either everyone understands and gets it or no one understands or can do so.

I very much doubt that anyone here sees it that way. As jar said, the wide variety of belief suggests that no one's right.

You might want to give this a look: Diabetes & Dementia: Is High Blood Sugar Damaging Your Brain? | Cognitive Vitality | Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation

--Percy

You either trust God or you don't.

I'll use this as a springboard for something that occurred to me last night, so it will undoubtedly feel like a tenuous reply.

As I recall, you have repeatedly expressed trust in God to guide you. But it occurred to me that we would need to review the record of God's guidance to see how good that record is.

More specifically, my train of thought started with the Insurrection investigation and statements by Malcolm Nance (Nance’s Law of Intelligence Kismet: “Coincidence takes a lot of planning.”) -- as the Select Committee is uncovering evidence of high level planning for the coup which is now implicating acting members of Congress, the DC DA is filing a civil lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in order to use the discovery phase to uncover their sources of funding for their operations in the coup.

Thinking of Nance reminded me of his 27 Jun 2019 interview with Paul Rieckhuff of Angry Americans ("If you're not angry, you're not paying attention."). Rieckhuff is an Army infantry veteran and Nance a Navy retiree, both of whom had been in actual combat, so the interview (Malcolm Nance on Angry Americans: A Summer of Trouble & Trump // Hosted by Paul Rieckhuff) was an exchange of war and sea stories, mainly Nance's and mainly regarding Iran. A very interesting and informative interview.

Specifically the topic was how Trump was at that time pushing for going to war with Iran, so Nance not only recounted his own combat experience against Iranian forces (eg, Operation Praying Mantis, 18 April 1988) but also his intelligence assessment of Iranian capabilities and how that would play against our own forces (basically, Trump had no f*cking clue what he was going up against and thought we could just walk right over the Iranians, kind of analogous to Hitler thinking he would take the Soviet Union quickly and easily through Blitzkrieg).

The question of the then prospect of imminent war with Iran (and of Operation Praying Mantis) starts at 9:40 of the video. At around 11:10 he gets into his involvement in Operation Praying Mantis, specifically the Battle of Sirri Island. In the Battle of Sirri Island, an oil platform being used as a command-and-control post was destroyed and set ablaze, after which it was informally called "Sirri Lighthouse" ("which took about a year to put out."). As I recall from hearing it before but cannot find now, he said that the Iranians knew where they were because all they needed to do was to follow the smoke: a column of smoke by day and fire by night.

 
Which I thought sounded a bit too biblical. According to Exodus, God led the Israelites through the desert with a column of smoke by day and of fire by night, right? And it took them 40 years to be guided by God from Egypt to Canaan. Hmm.

So this morning I fired up Google Earth and measured the distance from Egypt to Canaan. Straight-line distance is about 300 miles, which is 100 leagues. Since one league represents the distance a person can walk in one hour (3 miles per hour), that journey should have only taken them 100 hours at best, which would translate to 20 days or less. Yet it took them 40 years. Even if we were to increase the distance 10-fold and limited them to an average of one mile per day (a rather extreme worst case scenario), that would still have taken only about 8 years, not 40! On a side note, a critic of creationist "arguments against gradualism" wrote that they were essentially making the same argument as the Exodus consisting of picking up the entire camp and moving it a few feet each day; that just simply isn't how things work.

What could account for them taking five times longer than an unreasonably worst case scenario? What other factor is there? The only other factor that I can think of is the fact that God Himself was personally guiding them.

Which would make God either a very incompetent or a very untrustworthy guide. He had to have been misleading them constantly, either intentionally or through incompetence (The Mountain Men (1980): "Haven't you ever been lost?" "Hmmm... been fearsome confused for a month or two, but I ain't never been lost!").

This god couldn't even find his way from Egypt to Canaan with both hands and a pillar of fire and you would trust him to guide you with that which is most important to you? If you were to call a cab for the airport and God was the driver, it could take you months or even years to get to the airport and even then you couldn't be sure that you were at the right one.

 

And by the way, how can evidence be presented that disproves a Deity which cannot be objectively quantified?

Disproof of an any deity is not the issue. It has never been the issue. There is no burden of disproof here, but rather a burden of proof and that burden is yours.

quote:

---

[When you search for God, y]ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)

---

So what do you have to present to us that would convince us of your own personal heresy instead of someone else's own personal heresy. There are as many personal heresies as there are heretics (AKA "theists"). How is anybody supposed to be able to judge the different heresies out there without any kind of objective standards, AKA evidence?

Without evidence, without objective standards, theism is nothing but a bunch of made-up stuff. How could you expect any of us to be convinced by stuff that you have just made up? In a couple of years, my two-year-old grandson will be able to do as good a job of making stuff up as you:

quote:

---

"Who broke this lamp?"
"An elephant came into the room and broke it."
"I didn't see any elephant."
"It was invisible."

---

Edited by dwise1, : I had increased the distance 10-fold, not 100-fold