The Amalekites are destroyed again and again and again.....

Hi Debby. Please explain what you're driving at. What are you meaning by "letter of credence." (credence/credibility)In what way/s do you look at your #1 and #2 as meaning very different things?

You never seem to get it right, Paul.From the gitgo my geneology statement was/has been and is:
1. frequency of geneological data.
2. quantity of geneological data.
My geneology statement also clearly referred to the Bible as a volumn/book and not specifically the Genesis Amalekite texts so as to lend credibility to the book.On point 2 you accuse me of writing what yo call a "lie'spin" yet you do not even contradict what I said. So I was telling the truth and you were lying. Moreover you ignore the alternative explanations I have put forward, so that your assertion here HAS been answered. Go back and read. I covered that when I began discussing the matter. I'm not sure what page, but you can find it as well as I.Paul, from here on, don't be surprised if I ignore you. You're too meanspirited, unfair and generally a waste of my time.

CF,
1. Repeat, we're talking frequency and quantity, not completeness as to gender.
2. We're not talking all of Tolkien's library of books, but a volumn/book.

In post 145 you stated:
"My claim was that the Bible has more geneological data in it than any other literary book."It seems that my only mistake was trusting you to accurately state your own argument.And no there is no need to go back and read the thread because I already know what your argument is. You claim that Genesis 14's reference to the Land of the Amalkites must not be taken as an anachronistic geographical reference and isntead must be referring to a people that ecxisted both at that time AND the time of the massacres. So all you have is a questionable interpretation of a verse not directly connected to those dealing with the actual slaughters - none of which offers any evidence that there are two separate peoples both called Amelekites. How would they know which Amelekites to slaughter ?And saying that you are goign to stop lying about me whenever I make an argument you can't answer or catch you doing something wrong is no deterrent at all. No more than being called "mean-minded" or a "liar" for daring to tell the truth about you was a deterrent.

Then LOTR still wins - much of the data pops up here and there in the story - "Gimli, son of Gloin" - as well as in the appendices. Since the Bible is a collection of volumes, I demand that you extend the same consideration to the Lord of the Rings material. Otherwise you're just stacking the deck so that you win. Next I suppose that you'll try to claim LOTR doesn't count because it's not called "The Bible."I don't believe how you're shifting the goalposts here. You claimed that the Bible must be true because no work of fiction would have so much pointless genealogical data. I've more than defended that the LOTR books have as much if not more than the bible - a claim you can't seem to rebut, mostly I suppose because you haven't read the books - and now you think an effective rebuttal is to point out that, unlike the Bible, LOTR is fictional.Absolutely, perfectly circular reasoning.Genealogical data in the Bible doesn't mean it's fiction, but it sure doesn't mean it's non-fiction, either. It's totally irrelevant to the veracity of the Bible, as we've more than demonstrated.

You must have misunderstood me. I have a copy of Return of the King about two feet away from me one my bookshelf. That's where I found the reference. I already knew that Tolkien's genealogy, details, and history are way more detailed than the Bible's. I don't mean that as a slam on the Bible. It got brought up, I just happened to know where to prove it.It's copyrighted work, so you'll probably not find it on a web site. You actually have to get a copy of Return of the King. The appendices are well over a hundred pages long, and they are all background history and genealogy.Just because it's not on a web site doesn't mean I haven't read it and don't know what it says .

Y'know, Buz, I have to throw this out, too. The Book of Mormon has a pretty thorough genealogy, too. I really don't want to read it again, but Joseph Smith did almost as thorough a job as Tolkien at inventing a history, and J.S. claims his is true and millions of people believe him.The more I think about it, the more I think J.S. and the Mormons shoot down the argument that a thorough genealogy suggests historic credibility, unless you want to grant them the same credibility you're asking for the Bible.I'm not biased against the Bible, btw. I believe the life I am living is exactly what the Bible, overall, is urging people towards. I'm just trying to look at this "genealogical detail provides credibility" argument objectively.

Hi buz,in message 146, you said: The way you use the word "credence" here is not clear. "Credence" is almost always used to express the amount of confidence a human has in the truthfulness of something. In other words, the normal way of using it in a sentence is: "I give credence to the Bible." Your use is very, very unusual, but valid. And it means something quite different, i.e. "The Bible has credence". In this usage, the word "credence" takes on the meaning of "credentials", or, even less commonly, "claim of truthfulness".Now, it is quite one thing for a person to say, "I place credence in the Bible." Or to say, "I place credence in the Bible because of the genealogies it contains." Those are personal statements of belief, and, as far as I am concerned, they are unarguable.It is quite another to say, "The extensiveness of the genealogies in the Bible are part of the credence of the Bible." This says this extensiveness is part of the credentials of the Bible, one of the things it presents us with to support a claim of legitimacy.This is a can of worms you might not want to open, as any text, particularly any religious text, could claim extensive genealogies as support for its legitimacy. As a fair-minded person, you would then have to accept that support. And that would take you one step closer to supporting the legitimacy of texts I can't see you wanting to support, like the Vedas, or the Book of Mormon.This is why I wanted a clarification. I could never place credence in any text simply because of the quantity of a particular type of information it contains. Quantity is a criteria too easily attained to be useful in judging anything. After all, paleontologists have uncovered an almost incalcuable number of fossils, if you include things like individual diatoms. Yet I doubt any rational person would say that the sheer quantity of fossils proves anything other than a lot of living things have been fossilized.Really, would you accept it if an evolutionist told you that the enormous number of discovered fossils was a part of the credence of evolution? I'm sure that you wouldn't accept any argument made by the evo side that was based merely on number.

I thought the "enormous quantity of fossils" was "part" of the credence of evolution. I mean if they only found one isolated bone of T-Rex I would be more inclined to disbelieve it's existance. If based merely on number or otherwise I can at least verify they're existance. But thats just silly me.

I think what she's saying is that the argument "I found 60 fossils at Lake Michigan, creationism must be true" or "But I found 70 fossils, so evolution must be true" is stupid.I rather agree. Although you could make an argument that the vast number of fossils we know about represents many more living things than could ever have lived on Earth at the same time. But that's a slightly different argument than what she's talking about.

I do think that type of argument is pointless. And I think quality of data is much more significant than quantity. Making arguments on the basis of quantity is fraught with danger. Look how difficult this thread has been for buz.After all, some people would look at the quantity of fossils and say, "Well, God can put as many fossils into the ground as he wants. It's just a test of faith." Sad, really, but true. Says more about them, of course, than it does about God.

TL, I can guarantee you that the BOM has far less geneological data than the Bible overall. I do have that. Are you understanding what I mean by geneological? As I stated, geneology can be history, but all history is not geneology, nor are lists of peoples and kings. Only those statements which trace family are geneological, like "so and so was the son of" or "so and so begat so and so," etc.This is one reason I consider the BOM unreliable. All of these folks in it other than the Biblical characters are no place to be found in history or archeology. There's nobody around in history with BOM geneologies traced to them.I suggest you take a good look at the OT books and note the frequency and quantity of this material in it. It's hard to get a handle on how much, since it is mostly a lot of short family statements whenever someone is mentioned. These are frequent in much of the OT and scattered widely enough that the enormity of them is easily un-noticed.

Buz, what's your cutoff point for the amount of genealogical data it takes to equal a true history to you? 10 generations? 100 generations? 1,000 generations?How much data does there have to be to mean that a literary work is true to you?

Debby, my point was simply that there's no reason to name so many relatives to everyone in a story without a purpose. There's just too much verifyable stuff in the Bible for the argument that these geneologies were put there for no reason but to deceive or to entertain the reader. I still say it lends some, I say some, credence to the Biblical record.

Yet, that's exactly what Tolkein did in the Lord of the Rings. So how does your argument make sense?