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This should not be confused with blind faith in scientists though, because scientists are only human and make errors or intentionaly are faking evidence.

That is kind of what I meant. The scientific principle may be sound, but unless you double check everything yourself, you have to make a judgement call somewhere down the line.

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I love these kinds of contradictions. Most are very easy to counter - some are not.

 

They are not easy to counter, as to counter them you have to induldge in all kinds of non-obvious interpretations of the text, and to put it in a context that does not make any sense for a bronze age tribe of desert nomads. I have not seen any countering of any of the contradictions in the bible that didn't essentially undermine the whole premise of the Christian faith. Christians on the one hand want to argue that the Bible is the literal word of God, yet when that word is contradictiory, or conveys something unpalatable, they immediately switch position and claim it is all relative and open to interpretation. Sorry, you can't have your cake and eat it too.

 

 

This is just off the top of my head, but I see no real problems with the passages you quoted:

It does not say that Jacob had seen God face to face, only that Jacob SAID he had.

 

Irrellevant - the entire Bible is someone claiming that God said this, Jacob said that, Whosiwhatsit spake thus. Christians base their religion on what Jesus is alledged to have said and done, as supposedly told and written down by his alleged disciples. In fact, the only book that directly quotes Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas, is not included in most Bibles and is regarded as heresy by most branches of Christianity. Mostly because it suggests that Jesus utterly condemned religion and organised faith, and because he claims not to be the messiah or the son of God, just a man with something to say.

 

 

The text is from the King James Version, a rather poor translation by todays standards. Even the New King James Version (and other, much better, translations) read "and they drove out", making it clear that it was 'Judah' (the tribe) who could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley...

 

So, a version of the Bible could be... Wrong? OH dear. how does one then find out which version is correct?

Surely God wouldn't have allowed so many people to have read a corrupted verion of His Holy word! Of course, the King James version was largely re-written by Francis Bacon to suit his own politics, but every other version also bears the imprint of the particular scribe(s) or monk(s) that wrote it down.

 

I understand An-eye-for-an-eye to mean: If someone does you wrong, do not wipe out the whole clan, only demand retribution according to the damage you have suffered. That is justice. Jesus sais, if you want to be perfect, you can go beyond what the law says and demand no retribution at all.

In other words, the bible justifies seeking revenge, which any sensible person would recognise as a vicious cycle of violence. Other parts of the bible speak of vengeance ten-fold on those that wrong you. Sorry, your God is a very unsavoury character. Add up the number of men, women and children God commanded the Israelites to murder - it is over a million people. God commanded various characters in the Bible to rape, commit incest, keep slaves, murder people. He drowned every living creature (alledgedly) in a petulant tantrum, like a toddler smashing his toys because they don't work the way he wants.

 

Again, Job 7:9 is a quote, so all the bible is saying is that Job had made a certain comment: Those who have died don't normally go back to the life they had lived before they died. John 5:28-29 does not contradict that.

 

All the Bible is saying is that Jesus and all the other characters made certain comments. What is your point?

 

Language is full of phrases where the same word is used for different things.

Which is why the Bible is so open to interpretation. Yet there are numerous passages that cannot reasonably be interpreted in any other sense than an exact literal one, without undermining the whole concept of the Bible being the word of God (it is very obviously the words of various small-minded men, and it has been translated and re-translated, rewritten, edited, re-worked so many times that the original versions of any of its books are lost in the sands of time, and will never be known.

 

The passage in James talks about people doing stuff they should not be doing. Genesis 22:1 is clearly talking about Abraham doing something which God told him to do, to see if he would in fact do it. Now I have no idea why the King James Version translates this as tempting, as 'testing' would be a far better english word to use here and modern translations do so, but I think it is pretty clear that we are talking about two different concepts here anyway.

 

The difference in this case is purely semantic. God was clearly testing Abraham by tempting him. Regardless, God tested Abraham in a way that any moral person would find disgusting.

 

On another one of God's little tests,

If I wanted to test your faith by demanding that you sacrifice your first born child to me, would you think I was a good person? If I tortured you to try and make you renounce your faith, would I be an evil person, or a divine agent of the LORD come to test your faith?

 

There are tons of websites which aim to find contradictions in the bible, and tons of websites which then debunk the 'contradictions'.

 

 

There are websites which clearly and decisively illuminate the contradictions in the Bible, and there are numerous websites that try in vain to explain away all of the contradictions and evil that the bible contains. They fail, because to explain away the contradictions, they must undermine the very basis of their religion (i.e, that the Bible is the infallible word of God) by changing their interpretations to suit their agenda. Having read several versions of the Bible in full, as well as the Apocryphal texts, I very quickly came to the conclusion that even if the contradictory nonsense in the Bible was partly true, it was so morally bankrupt, and depicted such a violent, parochial, racist, sexist, homophobic, childish, intolerant and opressive religion that it pretty much closed the case for me as to whether I thought Christianity had any virtue at all.

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That is kind of what I meant. The scientific principle may be sound, but unless you double check everything yourself, you have to make a judgement call somewhere down the line.

 

That's of course utter crap. Just because some scientist are faking evidence, doesn't mean that you have to ridicule the whole process. Evidence that is faked in science is usually at the frontier of of research, so it doesn't touch you very much. By the time it reaches you and has any consequence, in many cases it already has been verified. At least as long as we talk about pure science and research (I'm not talking about medicals and chemistry because this is a bit different). Your computer wont stop working, just because a scientist faked some evidence in an genetic experiment.

Of course if you read scientific newspapers, then you may have to have some faith or double check, but then you are probably much closer to that frontier anyway, and it is a long way from speculation to hard evidence.

Gerhard

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Who cares, even if the bible didn't contradict itself once, the whole thing comes down to whether you believe certain people in the distant past had direct contact with some universal entity responsible for creating everything, and it told them certain facts about how we all should live our lives.

As far as I'm concerned, they either made it all up, or genuinely believed their own delusions.

 

A question I often like to ask of christians is this:

Considering your belief system is based entirely on believing that you know what god wants, and you only know this through other people, who claim god has told them what he wants, I want to know what your criteria are for beleiving someone when they say they've been in direct contact with god, and god has told them how you should live your life. Do you beleive anyone who claims god has told them things?

If not, then how do you decide if the person is genuine or not?

 

Hehehehe, an excellent question oDD. It's quite a neutral one too, thus giving it more credit :)

 

(yes i had to pop out of nowhere and say that! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!)

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That's of course utter crap. Just because some scientist are faking evidence, doesn't mean that you have to ridicule the whole process. Evidence that is faked in science is usually at the frontier of of research, so it doesn't touch you very much. By the time it reaches you and has any consequence, in many cases it already has been verified. At least as long as we talk about pure science and research (I'm not talking about medicals and chemistry because this is a bit different). Your computer wont stop working, just because a scientist faked some evidence in an genetic experiment.

Of course if you read scientific newspapers, then you may have to have some faith or double check, but then you are probably much closer to that frontier anyway, and it is a long way from speculation to hard evidence.

 

 

The beuty of the scientific method is that frauds, fakes and mistakes will be discovered. All scientific theories must be falsifiable, ie disprovable to be considered valid, and all scientists must leave room for doubt. There is no certainty in science, only probability.

 

The thing with things like evolution, radicarbon dating, plate tectonics etc is that not only are the theories falsifyable, but the underlying science underpins so much of science and technology that we can be as close to certainty as science can ever hope to provide in saying that they are correct, because otherwise, everything built on top of them is wrong and we are back to square one, and the probability of that is vanishingly small. this is not a question of faith, but of probability.

 

Scientific theories allow you to make predictions with confidence, something which religion has a woeful record of.

 

In terms of evidence, the bible is what is known as hearsay. John says that Jesus says X, Some guy says that some other guy says that God said Y. It wouldn't even be admisible in a court of law, much less the more rigorous evidenciary requirements for science. To base they way you live your life on this kind of flimsy hearsay is just stupidity.

 

I am all for tolerance and respect for different viewpoints, but only up to a point. I have no respect for people who mutilate the genitals of their newborn babies on the basis of hearsay. I have no respect for people who's religious texts instruct them to force women who have been raped to marry their rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29). If Christians actually bothered to read the Bible in its entirety, instead of just passages carefully selected for them and edited by the Church, I suspect quite a few would begin to grow a bit uneasy about the nature of the God they worship.

 

How strong is your faith Christians? As Mark 16:17-18 says "believers can drink any deadly thing and it shall not hurt them". Go on, take a big swig of potassium cyanide, put your faith to the test. Oh? Your faith wavering now, is it?

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I am all for tolerance and respect for different viewpoints, but only up to a point. I have no respect for people who mutilate the genitals of their newborn babies on the basis of hearsay.

Amen to that! If I thank my parents for but one thing, its that even thoguh everyone else was doing it, and that they have always been firm catholics, they thought that circumsicion was unnatural and unnesecary, and also found out about problems it can cause later in life.

 

I read about all kinds of things that can go wrong, such as even neutering the child.

 

I also read that no medical profession in the world will condone this practice.

 

(Yep just chiming in to have my bit of fun again)

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to certainty as science can ever hope to provide in saying that they are correct, because otherwise, everything built on top of them is wrong and we are back to square one, and the probability of that is vanishingly small. this is not a question of faith, but of probability.

 

Not everything is neccessarily wrong. After all, the stuff works, and since it works, there must be something correct with it. And as it is with an implication, you can get correct result with wrong assumptions.

 

Just an example: When I make a prediction that in roulette every hundreth roll causes the number 0 to appear. This is falsifiable and I can test this hypothesis. Obviosuly the assumption is wrong, because there is no hinherent relationshiüp between the number of rolls and the numbers they produce. But nevertheless I COULD have several rolls where it is the 100th roll AND the result is 0. This would appear to support my hypothesis even though the assumption is wrong. This example is blatantly obvious of course. But if the results are sufficiently correct most of the time, your assumptions can be wrong and it wouldn't matter much, until you challenge the hypothesis with a better plan. A good example is Newtionian Physics. It is correct in a given environment, but if you try to extend it it wont work anymore. That doesn't make it wrong though and in many cases Newtionian Phyiscs is still used because it works for these cases even though it is 'wrong'.

 

 

It [eyewittness reports] wouldn't even be admisible in a court of law, ...

 

Of course it would.

Gerhard

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Of course it would.

 

He's not talking about eyewitness reports, he's talking about hearsay. Hearsay is when a witness uses the fact that somebody said X to be proof that X is true, which is not admissible in most legal systems.

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They are not easy to counter, as to counter them you have to induldge in all kinds of non-obvious interpretations of the text, and to put it in a context that does not make any sense for a bronze age tribe of desert nomads.

Non-obvious interpretations of the text? I really don't think so.

 

Irrellevant - the entire Bible is someone claiming that God said this, Jacob said that, Whosiwhatsit spake thus. Christians base their religion on what Jesus is alledged to have said and done, as supposedly told and written down by his alleged disciples. In fact, the only book that directly quotes Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas, is not included in most Bibles and is regarded as heresy by most branches of Christianity.

What are you talking about? Quoted text is obviously different from non-quoted text.

You say Jesus is never directly quoted in the new testament? Are you having a laugh?

 

Our views are so far apart, I don't think there is much point in continuing this.

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...What are you talking about? Quoted text is obviously different from non-quoted text...

Our views are so far apart, I don't think there is much point in continuing this.

 

 

There is no difference whatsoever in whether the Bible is directly quoting God, Jesus or Jacob etc - it is all still the word of men, claiming something very dubious, claiming to speak for someone who is not present (or not willing or able to make their presence known) to verify what is claimed of them, and frequently contradicting each other. If the Bible claims that God told so-and-so to slaughter the Midianites and rape their women and smash their babies on rocks, it is no different to the passages saying God told Noah to build a boat etc, or an angel told Mary she was knocked up by a deity. It is all hearsay, a story which is indistinguishable from fiction. Hell, even the Ten Commandments are self-contradictory. Thou Shalt not kill, yet the punishment for breaking the ten commandments as commanded by God is to... kill the offender. hmmm. The list of contradictions, inconsistencies, absurdities and heinous acts commanded by Yahweh is extremely long compared to the short collection of carefully selected passages you will hear in Churches. If you think any of the feeble rebuttals offered by various Christians make the slightest sense, well, that is up to you, but the very act of trying to explain away the contradictions, absurdities and immorality of the Bible only proves how impossible it is to take literally, or to be used as the basis for understanding the natural world, or making moral jusdgements.

 

As long as you are unable to review your beliefs critically, rationally and objectively, there is no point discussing the matter.

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The faithful always bail when they are faced with having to consider their beliefs objectively. One of the reasons most Christians don't read the Bible in great detail (if at all) - it puts them off their religion...

 

The quickest way to get a religious person to run away is to ask them to explain why they believe what they do in a way that doesn't use circular reasoning.

 

Faith is merely a more succinct way of saying wishful thinking...

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I'd expect the main reason why a christian believes in his/her own faith is because they need to feel secure in that they're living towards something, not living to just die and disappear forever in the end. I look at it objectively, and rather then thinking about if there was a supreme being that created the world in seven days i find it more interesting to think about who or what created our dimension. The universe is huge obviously and if you open up celestia and have a look at how fast light speed really is in relative to a galaxy or star you'll see it is absolutely useless for getting around anywhere. Celestia is also good because it has the real database of existing (found) galaxies, stars, etc.

 

Anyways, the point is that even if a person who believed in a faith found out it was actually false he'd still believe it to have that sense of security and to feel he's actually useful in this universe. I'm no pesimist, but if you have a look at our role in our galaxy its pretty insignificant. Anyways, basically i was trying to say that you can never convince someone who believes in a faith to turn away from it - especially if they've been living with it for many years.

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Virtually every so-called christian in the world, and certianly all Western Christians, are blatant hypocrites.

They claim to be following the teachings of Jesus Christ and the bible, but what they actually do is pick and choose the easy tasks and ignore the rest.

If you truely beleived that christ was the son of god, and followed his teachings, then you would strain every muscle to live your life the same way he did.

He would have given his last penny to a beggar, he would rather have gone hungry himself that see someone else go hungry. His whole life was devoted to helping others with no thought for himself.

Is that the way western christians behave?

Is it fuck.

Most of them live in swanky houses with all the modern comforts and a big bank balance, and sit watching the the news on huge widescreen plasma TVs about millions of starving people. The price of that TV alone would have fed one of those starving people for life.

Christians don't follow the teachings of Jesus at all, they just do the easy stuff, but anything in the bible that might cause them discomfort or hardship in their lives, they completely ignore.

A true Christian wouldn't spare a single thought for themselves, have not a single comfort, own not a trinket or gaudy bauble, or anything they didn't absoltuely need, and would devote their entire existence to helping others.

Then there's the church as an institution.

The amount of wealth the church has is astounding, but yet again they do little to help all the unfortunate people int he world.

If they sold of all their assets they could stop literally millions of people from dying of poverty.

Religion is just a joke. They even fool themselves into thinking that they're truely religious.

Religous people don't really beleive in god at all.

They kind of hope god exists, they're not sure, but they go aloing with it anyway 'just in case'.

IF you really, truely beleived in god 100%, then you would devote every single second of your life to his every word, and the words of his son Jesus.

You would not pick and choose which words you followed. It's not a fucking buffet.

Civillisation will not attain perfection until the last stone, from the last church, falls on the last priest.

- Emil Zola

 

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You don't need any faith in science, it is proven by it's many results and successes, which we all have full access to, particularly the technology.

One could say the same about God then if they have experienced the sucesses. Only someone who has not been to lots of science classes would say it requires no faith. After receiving a university degree in a science you would likely change your mind. Science is so contradictory it is not even funny, but what counts are results as you said.

 

Does it matter if the laws of science contradict eachother and cannot be reconciled? Not really so long as they each hold predictive power and the user knows where their limits are and applies them only where they will predict correct outcomes.

 

Anyway, you people are all fiery and excited to get down on people of faith, and it is quite humorous. Why do you care? Did your parents force you to go to church when you were little or something? Do crusaders come to kill your family? Why are you so uptight?

 

The bible is full of contradictions that is true, but I don't understand why anyone would think it was a literal work anyway, I mean it was translated and hacked together for thousands of years if a person expects it to retain whatever coherency it originally had they are deluding themselves.

 

My favorite little contradiction, is when some guy comes to Jesus and asks for him to heal his son, Jesus is like "Well ok bring him in" and the dude goes "Oh he is at home, if you just say it then he will be healed." then it says something like "Jesus was surprised" so for all those that think Jesus was/is God or whatever it must make them wonder why he was surprised if he knew everything...

 

BTW WTH does this have to do with new years?

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After receiving a university degree in a science you would likely change your mind. Science is so contradictory it is not even funny, but what counts are results as you said.

 

Aparently your computer works, otherwise how would you post that message? I suppose it's not your first day with a computer, so it repeatedly and demonstratebly works. Now go ahead and do the same with god.

 

Does it matter if the laws of science contradict eachother and cannot be reconciled?

 

Which ones exactly contradict each other? Also, I guess oyou are aware, that we don't kneo everything at the moment, so science is an on-going process.

 

The bible is full of contradictions that is true, but I don't understand why anyone would think it was a literal work anyway, I mean it was translated and hacked together for thousands of years if a person expects it to retain whatever coherency it originally had they are deluding themselves.

 

Well, if believers wouldn't claim that it is to be interpreted litaerally then it would probably easier.

Gerhard

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