Who to believe , Ham or Ross?

Lord of the Rings certainly presents itself as a real history. I challenge you to find any indication within the text itself that its supposed to be read as fiction. The fact that they shelve it in "fiction" doesn't count.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I picked an example that I knew you would find ridiculous. And it is. (BTW you are actually wrong, Lord of the Rings isn't historical fiction, it's Second World fantasy.)But here's the thing. The fictional conceit of the Lord of the Rings is that its not fiction; its a recovered manuscript authored by Bilbo and Frodo Baggins called "the Red Book". There's no indication in the text that what we're reading isn't the literal history of the War of the Ring. There doesn't have to be, of course, because nobody reading it would mistake it for events that actually happened in the real world. I mean, duh, right?But you've already eliminated that line of argument. According to you, it doesn't matter what we know about the real world; if a book that claims to be the truth (as LOTR does) says it happens, then it must have happened.For the same reason that nobody mistakes LOTR for a history because of its drastic and obvious incongruity with real events in the real world, so too should the Bible not be mistaken for real history, because of its obvious incongruities with real events in the real world.

How can the "way the Bible presents itself" be evidence of its factuality? I mean, how gullible are you? Are we to trust every single claim presented as fact? Isn't that how lies are presented, too? As fact? (Isn't that what makes them lies?)

Who hasn't? I especially loved The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.What does that have to do with anything? I already know how - compare the narrative to the physical evidence. It's not really that hard, after all. No, why would it be? Lies don't become truth just because they are believed, even if they're believed for a long time or by many people. You might find, if you asked, that most people have heard that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen, or even believed it; the fact that it was believed, however, doesn't exhume Walt's body from his California cemetary and dunk him in liquid nitrogen.

If you haven't done all those things already, then why do you believe it?You're correct to point out that we have a higher standard of proof than you appear to. The question is, why do you have such lower standards for what you're willing to believe?

Yes. Yes! For God's sake, yes. Me, and everybody else. And everything you've ever read. And experienced. You need to be distrustful of all of it. You should distrust everything you think you know.It sounds hopeless, to be that distrustful, but honestly it only lasts about 30 seconds before you realize that you can be distrustful of everything you know and yet, attempt to construct a body of conclusions about the world that allows you to function in it, come to a modicum of understanding about your place in it, and helps you make predictions about what will happen next. And then you will probably realize that a whole lot of people came to this conclusion before you did, and maybe you should see what they were able to accomplish before you joined the club. Asking direct questions and verifying information may be rude, but its also the only intelligent thing to do. Which is more important to you? Finding out what you can and having the best information, or not hurting people's feelings? I think you'll find, by the way, that absolutely no one here - except, generally, the creationists - will be offended if you act like you don't trust them and either ask for confirming evidence, or seek it out yourself.Back to the topic. I'm sorry, I'm fairly familiar with the Bible, having read it and all, and I just don't see that this is true. The vast majority of the Bible is presented as:1) Poetry/mythology (Genesis, Exodus, Revelations, most of the rest)
2) Legal commentary (Numbers, Deuteronomy, etc)
3) Epistilary communications (the Gospels, etc)I don't see anything in the Bible presented as a factual account of events that really happened. Particularly since so many of the accounts in the Bible, especially the accounts of the life of Jesus, are mutually contradictory in regards to details. You have to understand that even factual reporting is a creative work; the modern distinction between "fiction" and "nonfiction" is pretty much a media-driven thing, and a dangerous mental habit, to boot. Prior to the modern age there was literally no distinction between mythology and real history. (That's why the job of modern historians is so hard.) It's that tradition of the interweaving of fact and invention that Tolkein invokes for his novels, in fact.To ancient peoples, there was no difference between an epic poem and real history. The poem was their history.The Bible is no different. To the ancient peoples, it was certainly their real history, just like the Epic of Gilgamesh was their real history, like Beowulf was their real history, like the panopoly of Greek, Norse, Egyptian, and all the other mythologies were their real history.I don't expect you to understand. That would require research and learning that you're simply unwilling to do. And lets not mess around - the end result of this research and learning would be you no longer believing in the literal truth of the Bible, so why would you even bother? (Why are you still here, exactly?)

You'd be wrong. My friends are scientists. When I ask for confirming evidence, they present it to the best of their ability. They don't storm off in a huff because they know what it takes to actually know anything. Now, I don't always ask, because often, it doesn't matter if what they're telling me is true or not.But when it comes to stuff where I might make changes in my life as a consequence - say, because the Bible says to, or something - I look for evidence. It's idiotic not to.Tell me, Faith - how do you distinguish truth from lies? What's your methodology for truth-detection? Tell me about those standards, and how you employ them. From where I'm looking, you don't appear to have any standards in regards to truth and objectivity whatsoever. So drop the name-calling and prove me wrong. Prove that objectivity can be reached by human beings. Refute solipcism, if you can. You'd be the first.Ever.AbE: More on not taking people's words for things - I'm sure you have this mental cartoon where Crash's friend tells him about something he did over the weekend, and Crash says "oh yeah? prove it." And the friend says something like "are you calling me a liar?"Here's a hint, Faith, because you're clearly not old enough (or haven't been lied to enough) to have learned this yet: when people ask you if you're calling them liars, its generally because they're lying to you. That's what I meant before when I called you "gullible"; your only apparent methodology for determining if the Bible is lying to you is to see whether or not the Bible says its not lying; unless you're an idiot, and I don't think you are, this is a methodology that you would find ridiculous applied to any other individual or source.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 03-31-2005 02:06 AM

What, by mind-reading? What's your methodology for truth-detection? "Oh, he has an honest face." Yeah, that's always worked.

What's your methodology for truth-detection?

The "opponent's" position is that "evidence is meaningless", and that's so obviously wrong, why would we give it any credence?

...every religious text ever written.Look, seriously. We get it. "The Bible gets special rules, etc." "Everything is wrong except the Bible, unless it agrees with the Bible." Yeah. Heard it all before, and it was just as silly then as it is now.I'm at a loss for how to address this stuff. If you think turning your scepticism off the minute you crack into the pages of the Good Book, or that the normal rules of sense and logic cease to apply to anything with a cross on the cover, then its pretty clear that you're not going to be receptive to reason on this issue. I might just as well argue with the bum around the corner who is convinced that a shadowy government organization put a chip in his head.This is why creationists aren't scientists, and why creationism will never be science; true science applies the same method to everything under its perview. The second you say "well, here's something that we're not, under any circumstances, going to apply the scientific method to," you've left Science-Town.And that's fine. Nobody says that you have to play by our rules. Just don't teach this make-believe to my children when they should be learning science, and don't ask me to pay for it with my tax dollars.

Not a single one of these books was written sooner than 5 decades after the events they describe. Moreover, since the books were written anonymously, there's no indication that the writers were in fact eyewitnesses, or that the people they described as "witnesses" actually witnessed, or even existed. In fact the authors don't even make the claim to be eyewitnesses. Considered by who to be inspired? You mean a committee put this book together? Just arbitrarily decided which materials were "scripture" and which were not?And somehow we're supposed to believe that the result of this committee's cherry picking is, coincidently, exactly the book God had in mind?Look, no offense, but if I were God, and I wanted my people to have a book, I'd give it to them. Already bound and everything. A whole crateful of books for them to pass out. This committee stuff, this sorting of competing gospels of varying degrees of "inspiration", rather undermines the claim that the Bible is the Word of God exactly as he intended it, don't you think? No, it detracts from it. It's an indication we're looking at plagerized accounts.

How about you start by proving your own assertions. If you can show external evidence for the claims you've made, I'll do the same.Oh, wait. We've been here before. I remember - the Bible gets special rules, and so nothing it says has to be supported by anything, just because its the Bible. "Delusion" would be a grown woman who believes in the literal truth of a book that begins with a talking snake.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 04-01-2005 02:44 AM

The author of Luke makes the opposite claim, in fact, in the very first verses, where he says that he's compiling information from other sources to develop his Gospel:

quote:

---

1 Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, 2 just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, 3 it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent The-oph'ilus, 4 that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.

---

The earliest that the Gospel of Luke could possibly have been written is usually given to be about 80 AD. That's a generation after the events it describes. They're clearly reports of what was claimed to have been witnessed. How are we to judge the credibility of the writer without any idea of his identity? Oh, my bad, I forgot again. The Bible gets special rules about how we judge its veracity, rules that we would have to be the most gullible idiots to apply to any other source. How could I keep forgetting?

C'mon. You can't really believe that? What would the quality of the writing have to do with the credibility of the writer? And your insistance on the opposite means that if it's false, which is considerably more likely given the spectacular claims of the Bible, you'll never know. Which is exactly what I would write in my book if I were trying to start a religion, too. No shit. If I were trying to get people to swallow these ridiculous fabrications that's exactly what I would tell them, too. "If you want to follow me, and trust me, you do, then you have to do so without proof or evidence of any kind, and in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. Don't worry, if you do, you're a better person than all those schmucks who have to have evidence to accept a proposition."I mean, duh. That's the first thing you would tell your followers if you were trying to get them to believe a whole lot of ridiculous lies. I don't despise it; I just know, because its been proven, that eyewitness testitmony is never particularly accurate. Sometimes its hilariously inaccurate.