Noah's Ark

What are these philosophies based on?Do you ever sleep?

one part innaccurate gospels, one part faith. like i said, i THINK. i believe. now let the stupid joke go. apparently not.

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אָרַח

Okay, joking apart.Why do you reject so much of the Bible as being unreliable, inaccurate, propaganda, unhistorical, etc. Yet, from the same collection of texts you *think* Jesus is a groovy guy. How do you find passages about Jesus to be reliable when you acknowledge that so much of the other texts are unreliable? I mean, many of the stories about Jesus sound about as believable as the Flood, or do you only accept Jesus as a groovy guy and not as your Lord and Saviour who shed his blood for your sins so that you could have eternal life?Brian.PS, I am seriously interested in this, I am not trying to pull your leg or have a dig at your faith. if you don't want to answer then its cool.

don't know. like i said, some things are just faith. i don't, really. actually, i find most of the bible reasonably reliable for what it is. i tend to find the nt texts a little less reliable than the old. but like i said, it's really just a matter of a faith. i believe in the jesus that said "love your enemy" not "kill your enemy." i think that behind all the innaccuracies and errors and sometimes deception, something of truth and worth and value managed to get through. thought his words seem to be distorted at times, the message seems to be pretty good.part of this is that it contradicts the other texts in ways. contradictions are actually the key to validity, i think. or moses, or anything else in the book, really. not totally sure at the moment. i think i do. but i also think that god loves for who we are, not how we think. i think christ was an attemp to prove that, and the message was misunderstood. but like i said, i've been having a rather large crisis of faith as of recently.so i can't really give you a clear answer on how exactly i believe.

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Cheers mate, I appreciate the reply.Brian.

Sorry to be boringly on-topic, but I was poking around the AiC site and stumbled across a rather nice little article on how the wording in Genesis supports a local flood. The Article's off site at Godandscience.org:

quote:

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in the majority of instances kol erets does not refer to the entire planet earth. In fact, of the 205 instance of kol erets in the Old Testament, it might refer to the entire planet just 40 times, and even some of those are questionable. About half of those instance occur in the books of Psalms and Isaiah.
How could the text have more clearly indicated a global flood?
I am glad you asked! There is a Hebrew word that always refers to the entire earth or the entire inhabited earth. The word is tebel (Strong's H8398), which is found 37 times in the Old Testament. Curiously, this word is never used to describe the flood, although it is used extensively to describe the creation of the earth and the judgment of the peoples of the earth...

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Arach, this looks like your area

Not really. Actually, It's my area. And just for gratification, Arach, I was asking whether you were evo or whether you werent evo! SO which are you, Arachnophilia.

In that case, would you like to comment on the uses of kol erets and tebel, and the implications for the Flood?

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

as brian pointed out, it says that the flood covered the highest mountaints under the entire heaven. that would indeed indicate a global flood.

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Yes, that is annoying. But it's nearly inerrant...

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

eh, my point is really that people who claim to read it literally don't. they tend to bend it a little fit modern notions of reality and possibility. it's not about literalness, it's about inerrency. it just has to be correct, and then they'll SAY they're reading it literally.i have more respect for people like AiG who have the balls to say science is wrong, the bible is right. although misguided, at least they've recognized that the two don't quite fit together.

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I'm still getting my head around the literal vs inerrant bit. It doesn't help when we've got umpteen translations, and almost nobody is reading the original text (and then, of course, there is the problem of which 'original'!). Grudgingly, I also have to admire YEC's for toughing it out in the face of... well, almost everything. Although, I'd admire them more if they did it quietly and left the rest of us get on with our lives...This message has been edited by Dead Parrot, 05-13-2005 01:27 PM

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Mat 27:5 And he went and hanged himself
Luk 10:37 Go, and do thou likewise.

or rather that we don't have originals of anything. even the "originals" often would not be originals themselves. for books like genesis, an original in its modern form would still be composed of at least 3 earlier texts.well, literal vs inerrant is kind of an important difference.literal is a method of reading. you read it literally, for what it says, without metaphorical meanings (such as "day" meaning "epoch") or interpretations not based on context. i would argue that context and idiological readings are ok, and true to the sense of literalness. often, literal readings require a bit of recognition of what the text is. is it literally a metaphor for something, such a parable? some people seem to ignore this approach. but even reading jesus's parables, we can recognize that he's telling them to illustrate a point, not retell history. this is consistent with much of the bible. we can read it literally and examine what it says without insisting that it happened. it can be literal, but at the same time innaccurate.inerrancy asserts that the bible is literally TRUE. emphasis on the true, not the literal. they are willing to bend the rules a little bit to get the bible to line up with reality. they insist they are reading it literally, but often they do not. especially when they recognize that the literal meaning might conflict with science. so things like "days" become "millions of year" for some groups, like old-earth creationists. the bible's still true -- IF you read it the right way. different inerrecists do this to different degrees.but a correct literal reading often refutes their points, and demonstrates that bible is in error sometimes. agreed. i'd also admire them more if they recognized that a literal reading of the bible is sometimes wrong. remember the firmament discussion? good example. i was the literalist in that discussion. i worked solely from what the bible had to say, and analyzed its context and content, and then compared it to the real world. the inerrecists started with an understand of the world, and applied the bible to it.

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אָרַח

What beats me is the degree of mangling that the poor scripture goes through to reach the required meaning. Incidentally, (before we return to the Flood, obviously!) could you recomend a source or two for literal reading? Something that doesn't require me to learn greek and hebrew, preferably!Edit: I can't spell "inerrancy". But I'll leave it, it's perversly apt.This message has been edited by Dead Parrot, 05-13-2005 10:56 PM

ahahahaa. oh, irony. uh, well, the bible. usually it stands on it's own, and doesn't need too much poking into to read it flat out literally. it's more the mindset of the viewer. however, a good translation helps.a lot of literalists prefer a word-for-word literal rendering. but this doesn't really help us, because the average reader does not understand context, figures of speech, and common idioms.for instance, if it says that someone goes into a cave to cover his feet, it's kind of confusing if you just read it straight literally, word-for-word, unless you know what the expression for urination is in ancient hebrew.so i'd suggest a good idiomatic translation (i prefer the new jps) that correctly renders the concepts into modern terminology: ie: "relieved himself." it may not be literally what the text says, but it's what it means, and it's A LOT easier to read literally in english.it's also not a violation of literalness, really. we use similar things in english all the time. if i say "i think katie holmes is really sleeping with tom cruise, even if she won't admit it" do i mean that they're both asleep, right now, together? no, not really. literally, i mean i think they engage in sexual intercourse on a regular basis. even if that's not literally what i said. it's just more comfortable to use a euphemism, and the bible does it alot.so we're confronted with a question: if we only read and understand modern english, is it better to render the ideas correctly in modern terms and expressions, or to keep the literal wording of the text?i think if we're gonna insist on reading it literally, and NOT learn context and the original languages so that we have to change it anyways, we should correctly translate the ideas, not just the wording.(edit: as for katie holmes and tom cruise, i don't really care whether or not they bump uglies. i just picked a random example)This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 05-13-2005 07:19 AM

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