Funny anti-religious Internet pics

[belamo]

Oh, by the way, I am (finally!) using the crappy 1984 edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia that I bought from these people over a couple of years ago now

So there goes more time to waste from my sorry loser life

[Kulindahr]

Yes, belamo. I've heard the same argument recently also. "But the church existed during the enlightenment! Therefore it was responsible for it!"

Similarly the Politburo existed during the time of Solidarność. Surely we don't assume the politburo is responsible for that. It makes no more sense to give credit to the church for the advances of the enlightenment than it does to give credit to Louis XVI for masterminding the French Revolution.

You're the only one stating any such argument.

[StarCrasher]

Fail on reading comprehension.

He did have a point.
He linked to two other of your threads to show it.

Try again.

But those threads were blank. I didn't state anything in them, you say.

[StarCrasher]

Okay, for the sake of argument....How would you explain away the fact that there is a very large boat lodged high up in the crevices of Mt Ararat in Modern day Turkey, and that it very much fits the measurements as in the Book of Genesis?

What the fuck are you talking about?

Do you believe every bullshit claim you hear? There's no boat up there.

Do you believe that the Muslim's found Adam and Eve's 30-foot-tall skeletons too?

What about the Easter Bunny? Is he coming and hiding eggs in your house this weekend?

[Kulindahr]

What are falsehoods ONLY according to the falsehoods to which you cling is what I propose to discuss... but you seem too afraid to get away from your own falsehoods.

You said something like the Bible is a mass of contradictions. That's false.
The only defense of your position on the Bible that's been made is Fundamentalist picking and choosing, refusing to read it as a whole book.

My "falsehoods" are called "reading the whole book" and using scholarship.

The "preservation and revival of learning" did not come through the Catholic church but through the Greek heretic Christian or Arab pagans miscreants:

Good at changing the subject, aren't you?

Your original assertion was that the Church destroyed technology and learning. That's false -- it preserved it, via the monasteries mostly. You keep jumping away from what you asserted to entirely later events.

Your assertion covered the collapse of Rome, so stick to the centuries between 300 and 700.

BTW, Western monasteries never stopped exchanging scholarship with their Eastern counterparts -- they were rather independent, that way.

we had it IN SPITE of the Catholic church, but that the church actually preserved and "advanced" even a small amount of that heritage is a lie repeated so many times that too many people accept it as a matter of faith without caring to examine the truth of it, and they consider that you are the liar if you deny and attack them for telling simply the truth that is there for anyone to read and understand. I wrote above what was actually that supposed "preservation" and "fostering".

LOL

I used to believe the fable you do. Then I ran into some books about medieval technology and invention, that had nothing to do with the Church -- except that consistently throughout, the places that those were preserved and improved were monasteries, which happen to be part of the Church. It doesn't really matter what the hierarchy and the asswipe in Rome were doing; the monasteries just kept improving what the Romans had and coming up with ideas of their own.

Interestingly, there's another theme running through that: a great deal of technological advancement in those monasteries had to do making wine and beer.

No, Liberation Theology is considered heretical because it tends to show that Catholic "truths" and dogmas are NOT Bible-based.

Hmm. I've read a few thousand pages of liberation theology, and they have a habit of referencing Marx and others quite frequently. Those figures aren't relevant to theology, and building theology relying on them is by definition heterodox at the least.

Finished the Greek part, starting over on it, and using my Easter vacation period to start the Hebrew part and test what are my profitings from the Hebrew handbooks I have been cramming the past few months. So far I have only gathered a few "interesting" points in translation here and there across the bibliography I use as a translator and translating geek.
Get back on me for next Christmas (provided we are still around) if you ever are actually interested in my progress with all that.

How many years of Greek? Have you gotten to where you can pick up Aesop's Fables or something by Aristotle and just read?

"Translator and translator geek"?

Religion is a claptrap in itself, whether alone or on the rocks.

The vast majority of the world, including many very educated and intelligent people, disagree with you.

[Kulindahr]

Okay, for the sake of argument....How would you explain away the fact that there is a very large boat lodged high up in the crevices of Mt Ararat in Modern day Turkey, and that it very much fits the measurements as in the Book of Genesis?

Mikey . . . .

Which claim is this? I've seen three.

[belamo]

So you jump five or six centuries later to describe what happened when Rome came apart? That's really sloppy procedure.

No, I summarize what happened and where it came from: it's far less sloppy that simply saying something is sloppy, without actually indicating what is that is being called "sloppy", and with only what sloppy reference to "jump five or six centuries later"... from what?

You're also making the error of treating the Church as a monolithic entity with a modern sort of control over all its parts. That's far, far from the truth. As the middle ages progressed, monasteries, often not even under the control of anyone but their own Father General (or whoever), did as they darned well pleased. The monks didn't appreciate hard labor more than anyone else, and so they pursued innovation and invention. Especially by the time you reference, when burnings of heretics was going on, the level of their creativity had gotten quite impressive.

Not even when I take it from your own monolithic reference to the church (notice that I wrote above about the "heretic" Greeks, you know, monophisism and all that crap). As the Middle Ages progressed, they progressed in the direction I exposed above, but not even then did "the monks" take as many liberties as you pretend. Apart from some truly rigorous logical thinking that later came to be despised by secular and seglar asses alike, the "impressive" "level of creativity" you refer to must ber of the kind of the Summa Theologica, I assume?

[Kulindahr]

Oh, by the way, I am (finally!) using the crappy 1984 edition of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia that I bought from these people over a couple of years ago now

So there goes more time to waste from my sorry loser life

Some "helper" put mine in storage when I was relocating a few years ago, and I haven't seen it since. As Jockboy could attest, my Hebrew is deteriorating rapidly.

BTW, have you got the one with the introduction(s) in German, in Latin, or both?

[Kulindahr]

No, I summarize what happened and where it came from: it's far less sloppy that simply saying something is sloppy, without actually indicating what is that is being called "sloppy", and with only what sloppy reference to "jump five or six centuries later"... from what?

Not even when I take it from your own monolithic reference to the church (notice that I wrote above about the "heretic" Greeks, you know, monophisism and all that crap). As the Middle Ages progressed, they progressed in the direction I exposed above, but not even then did "the monks" take as many liberties as you pretend. Apart from some truly rigorous logical thinking that later came to be despised by secular and seglar asses alike, the "impressive" "level of creativity" you refer to must ber of the kind of the Summa Theologica, I assume?

The monks, especially the Cistercians, took a lot of liberties technologically -- that order along accounted for a couple of hundred inventions, all in the direction of making being a monk an easier life and having better brew to enjoy it with. But they and others also preserved Roman building techniques (too bad they didn't manage to keep the recipe for Roman mortar).

There's also evidence that a lot of classical manuscripts survived in various monasteries, until the time of Ignatius Loyola and then the Inquisition -- damn them.

As for the intellectual gymnastics of the Summa... Aquinas has never impressed me. I barely consider him a theologian, because he sets up Aristotelian above his source material, the Bible.

[StarCrasher]

You said something like the Bible is a mass of contradictions. That's false.

Funny, your entire argument about how the Bible doesn't permit slavery and executing gays relies solely on the contradictions found later in the Bible that you yourself so readily point out. Or does God just change his mind on a whim?

OK everyone, I said before you can take little girls from conquered villages as sex slaves, but ever since I became my own son and died in order to forgive you for Eve eating the apple I gave her, it's no longer OK to do that, because now I love everybody. Even the gays. Just keep believing in me or I'll send you to Hell.

Wow look everybody! God speaks! It must be true because it says so right here in this post!

How do you explain this atheists? Huh? Owned!

[MikeyLove]

Mikey . . . .

Which claim is this? I've seen three.

There are so many, and it may have been one of those three, and I also read a book years ago that had measurements, etc. I do not remember the title of the book. There are many Youtube videos. Might want to Google 'Noah's Arc'.

[StarCrasher]

There are so many, and it may have been one of those three, and I also read a book years ago that had measurements, etc. I do not remember the title of the book. There are many Youtube videos. Might want to Google 'Noah's Arc'.

This is a perfect glimpse into your distorted reality and the type of "evidence" you're willing to accept as unquestionable truth.

You don't know what claim it is because there are so many. You read a book one time. You can't remember the name.There are YouTube videos. Might want to Google "Noah's Arc".

Wow. Just WOW.

[belamo]

BTW, the Church had all that authority precisely because at the time of one of the last sackings of Rome a very wealthy Christian stepped forward and used up his own fortune trying to keep things running. The pope took over the program, and ended up effectively as king of a great deal of Italy. Until the Franks showed up, he was pretty much the heaviest secular power in the old Western Empire; it was his authority backed with actual armies that established his "spiritual" power (along with some tidily forged documents).

And whether or not something is technology has nothing to do with how widely it's available. If some monk in northern Scotland had come up with radio to talk with some other monk in Ireland, it would have been technology even if no one knew anything about it. It wouldn't have benefited anyone, is the only trouble, and that's where the myth of a technological slump in the "Dark Ages" comes from: the technology was still around and even improving, but only isolated communities had it for use.

they should really be called the "Dim Ages", both because the technology that could have lifted some of the dark wasn't spread around to do so, and because the authorities who made people afraid to spread it around were pretty dim in their policies.

What time of the "last sackings of Rome", the "time" of nearly four hundred and fifty years between 1084 and 1527? or 846? 546? 455? 410? those were the last" ones after the one around 390 BC. What "wealthy Christian": Cassiodorus?
With your appreciation of what a technological era actually is, you are using, whether in good or bad faith, the fallcious justification using a swallow to make a summer. Technology does not make sense unless a purpose and, most importantly, an economic and social system is supporting it to propose and impose it instead of another sort of technology... or any technology at all. Compare the car or the computer industry and technology, in Watt's or Babbage's time, respectively, and what we had after WWII.
Those "Dim Ages", if you want to call them that way, are like what we can see in more "tradionally living" parts of Africa or Asia.

How many years of Greek? Have you gotten to where you can pick up Aesop's Fables or something by Aristotle and just read?

"Translator and translator geek"?

I started like nineteen years ago, but I do not count my Greek per years or semesters. However, while coursing French philology studies at the UAB I took as many Greek and Latin courses as optional subjects as I could, so that seventeen years ago I was being asked to translate Thucydides at first sight.
In any case, that is FAR more than you need to get through and into that Simple Greek for Dummies that is the New Testament.

Read again: "translator" (status, profession) and "translating" (activity).

BTW, the Church had all that authority precisely because at the time of one of the last sackings of Rome a very wealthy Christian stepped forward and used up his own fortune trying to keep things running. The pope took over the program, and ended up effectively as king of a great deal of Italy. Until the Franks showed up, he was pretty much the heaviest secular power in the old Western Empire; it was his authority backed with actual armies that established his "spiritual" power (along with some tidily forged documents).

And whether or not something is technology has nothing to do with how widely it's available. If some monk in northern Scotland had come up with radio to talk with some other monk in Ireland, it would have been technology even if no one knew anything about it. It wouldn't have benefited anyone, is the only trouble, and that's where the myth of a technological slump in the "Dark Ages" comes from: the technology was still around and even improving, but only isolated communities had it for use.

they should really be called the "Dim Ages", both because the technology that could have lifted some of the dark wasn't spread around to do so, and because the authorities who made people afraid to spread it around were pretty dim in their policies.

The vast majority of the world, including many very educated and intelligent people, disagree with you.

That may be because, as in my comment above about what is understood as "church", educated and intelligent people are unawarely siding with those who do not actually have their same intelligence and education, but who purport to represent and defend the same beliefs from the institution they rule to claptrap "very educated and intelligent people" who are not aware of that nominalist sort of claptrap.

[Kulindahr]

Those "Dim Ages", if you want to call them that way, are like what we can see in more "tradionally living" parts of Africa or Asia.

The difference being that when things finally open up, the Cistercians and others had technology to immediately share and spread... and those "traditionally living" people don't.

I started like nineteen years ago, but I do not count my Greek per years or semesters. However, while coursing French philology studies at the UAB I took as many Greek and Latin courses as optional subjects as I could, so that seventeen years ago I was being asked to translate Thucydides at first sight.
In any case, that is FAR more than you need to get through and into that Simple Greek for Dummies that is the New Testament.

The NT is hardly "Simple Greek for Dummies" -- it has a wide range of 'types', if you want to call them that, from the near-classical of Hebrews to the run-on sentences of Paul (who, even in Greek, writes a sentence more than a page long?!), to the elegant simplicity of John, to the rustic "street Greek" of Mark.

It's been my experience that only people who can read Xenephon can actually deal with the whole NT.

[Kulindahr]

[Kulindahr]

[belamo]

Good at changing the subject, aren't you?

That is what you call my simply trying to elaborate and clarify on the mysteric one-liners that you slovenly let drop as hints that what you say is right just because you are sure you are.

Your original assertion was that the Church destroyed technology and learning. That's false -- it preserved it, via the monasteries mostly. You keep jumping away from what you asserted to entirely later events.

Your assertion covered the collapse of Rome, so stick to the centuries between 300 and 700.

BTW, Western monasteries never stopped exchanging scholarship with their Eastern counterparts -- they were rather independent, that way.

I don't "jump": again, I do what you do not, namely elaborate. You are the one jumping to CONCLUSIONS as if they were self-evident and came from nowhere but your own conviction, and jumping OUT of precisely that frame of Late Antiquity, from the Constantinean era to the beginning of the VIIth century, as you do jump when you plainly state that "Western monasteries never stopped exchanging scholarship with their Eastern counterparts" which using the tone and phrases you seem so fond to use on this thread IS totally, not just inaccurate, but false: it would be only inaccurate if you had said that there were exchanges through the so-called Middle Ages, because it would hint at a continuity of centuries that never was the case, but by pretending that the exchange actually was continuous, you are planily lying.
As I said in previous posts, there were punctual tidal flows of learning from the Greek and Arabic-speaking areas, particularly during the Late Middle Ages precisely, as I pointed out, when the economic and social and, therefore, intellectual system in the Western European area was developing independently from the church (although, of course, not totally FREE from it).

What you adscribe to the monacal system as flowering, only was ever so in the urban context: the beautiful, technologically savvy environment you depict in your vision of the monastery communities is the rosy wet dream of world- and civilization-weary survivalists, the Omega Men pathetically and unawarely defiling the the rags and loose threads of civilization they pretend to preserve and honor as precious whole garments...

Read again: I said that it didn't even care THAT much (apart from some barbaric burning and so) but that the church couldn't and wouldn't cope with the challenge of sustaining a complex and enlightened civilization, and that it simply took a couple (almost literally) of anecdotical and testimonial, in the technological context, and nitpicked manipulated texts in the case of textual heritage and tradition, as sustaining elements of their new parodic new Christian order.
Did the church preserve the industry and agricultural productivity, the communication, trade, monetary, urban and general social system of the Roman Empire? did Rome "fall" trying to preserve that but, oh, the church DID succeed?

LOL

I used to believe the fable you do. Then I ran into some books about medieval technology and invention, that had nothing to do with the Church -- except that consistently throughout, the places that those were preserved and improved were monasteries, which happen to be part of the Church. It doesn't really matter what the hierarchy and the asswipe in Rome were doing; the monasteries just kept improving what the Romans had and coming up with ideas of their own.

Interestingly, there's another theme running through that: a great deal of technological advancement in those monasteries had to do making wine and beer.

Hmm. I've read a few thousand pages of liberation theology, and they have a habit of referencing Marx and others quite frequently. Those figures aren't relevant to theology, and building theology relying on them is by definition heterodox at the least.

They are at least open and explicit in their references, while the claims of fundamental dogmas about the Virgin Mary have more in common with old pagan traditions that with anything that can be found IN the Bible. Of course, you can always poke as much as you want AROUND the Bible.

[belamo]

Some "helper" put mine in storage when I was relocating a few years ago, and I haven't seen it since. As Jockboy could attest, my Hebrew is deteriorating rapidly.

BTW, have you got the one with the introduction(s) in German, in Latin, or both?

Intro in German, English, French, Spanish and, finally, Latin. Why do you ask?
I just bought an item that seemed fine (despite silly reviews from users complaining about printing in the notes being too small .roll. ) and at a good price (like 20 or 30 EUR... I still keep the bill somewhere). The funny thing is that the covers are "rightwards" in the average Western alphabetic style, while the text inside goes "leftwards", in typical Semitic abjad style. Ah! the glories of free internet compounded with free commerce and some euros in to dispose of and trade for something truly worth something!

Damn you, there's still a lot from your airy posts to read, respond to and revise. Please, write everything you want because I am spending the next three days away from an internet connection... and I still haven't revise the traslation an old teacher-professor friend of mine send me two days ago...and that I wanted to send back duly nitpicked instead before parting tomorrow...
So if I do not answer to it all tonight, I will do it this weekend at post it next Monday, deal?

[tombastep]

This is a perfect glimpse into your distorted reality and the type of "evidence" you're willing to accept as unquestionable truth.

You don't know what claim it is because there are so many. You read a book one time. You can't remember the name.There are YouTube videos. Might want to Google "Noah's Arc".

Wow. Just WOW.

Back on topic please.

[looseliam]

http://www.tshirthell.com/funny-shir...ont-count-anal

[zoltanspawn]

No, being gay, black, white, red-headed, short, ugly, sick, etc., are things which we do not choose. They are neither right nor wrong. They just are.

Religion, on the other hand, is a choice to believe in incorrect information. If people insisted on running around arguing that 2 + 2 = 5 and 10/2 is 3, despite being given ample evidence to the contrary, I'd make fun of them too.

I don't think it's clearcut that religion is an explicitly chosen identity while race and sexual orientation are our material destiny. You may argue the merits of that opinion, but I think you'll probably at least concede that many people feel that their religious identity is of equal, if not greater, consequence to them than the other categories you cite. Whether or not it's nonsense, we are in the realm of considering people's most valued notions of themselves.

We ought to be able to talk about other people's senses of themselves. But if such a topic doesn't call for a modicum of thoughtfulness, I don't know which do.

[Mako247]

omg! i have been saying this for years!

[bankside]

You're the only one stating any such argument.

Oh no, that was Oakpope's position from a different thread. The one where I fundamentally misunderstood both the Enlightenment and the use of the circumflex accent in the word "to dare." I drew equal amounts of ire. But I did try to rebut it as it applied in this thread.

Incidentally, even though I find your position unconvincing, I do accept that you make an internally coherent argument in suggesting that the bible should be viewed as a whole; its passages of capricious tyranny (ensuring the inevitability of punishment and redemption by designing humans to be naive then setting an arbitrary standards of sinfullness) could be the product of a loving god whose purpose is to teach something about the nature of free will.

I don't find it at all plausible, or pleasant, or principled, but it is as I say internally consistent, and I do feel I owe more than just announcing my instinctual skepticism by way of rebuttal. I also think the same goes for the rest of us.

So for the rest of you, scoff if you must, but scoff with reasons;I expect no less of theists who disagree with me. I think it is not only more civilised but more likely to be convincing.

And now, an on-topic picture:


Delightfully this combines two of the old taboos, sex and religion. All we need to add is politics. Wait! Isn't Jesus a Republican?

(oh I think I even scored some points for implied sanctimonious American-bashing there.)

[Thynight]

Why God created man.

[Kulindahr]

That is what you call my simply trying to elaborate and clarify on the mysteric one-liners that you slovenly let drop as hints that what you say is right just because you are sure you are.

No, it's because you changed the subject.

I don't "jump": again, I do what you do not, namely elaborate. You are the one jumping to CONCLUSIONS as if they were self-evident and came from nowhere but your own conviction, and jumping OUT of precisely that frame of Late Antiquity, from the Constantinean era to the beginning of the VIIth century, as you do jump when you plainly state that "Western monasteries never stopped exchanging scholarship with their Eastern counterparts" which using the tone and phrases you seem so fond to use on this thread IS totally, not just inaccurate, but false: it would be only inaccurate if you had said that there were exchanges through the so-called Middle Ages, because it would hint at a continuity of centuries that never was the case, but by pretending that the exchange actually was continuous, you are planily lying.
As I said in previous posts, there were punctual tidal flows of learning from the Greek and Arabic-speaking areas, particularly during the Late Middle Ages precisely, as I pointed out, when the economic and social and, therefore, intellectual system in the Western European area was developing independently from the church (although, of course, not totally FREE from it).

Um, no, it came from a Greek Orthodox monk, a Russian Orthodox priest, and a Benedictine monk. It surprised me, because I thought all connections had been lost, even though I should have known better, since the East and West churches never lost contact, as evidenced by the intermittent excommunications and reunions.

What you adscribe to the monacal system as flowering, only was ever so in the urban context: the beautiful, technologically savvy environment you depict in your vision of the monastery communities is the rosy wet dream of world- and civilization-weary survivalists, the Omega Men pathetically and unawarely defiling the the rags and loose threads of civilization they pretend to preserve and honor as precious whole garments...

The Cistercians were in the urban areas? That would be news to them. It was the monasteries in the cities that didn't 'flower', as you put it; they were too much under the thumbs of the bishops.

I won't bother with your fantasies there.

Read again: I said that it didn't even care THAT much (apart from some barbaric burning and so) but that the church couldn't and wouldn't cope with the challenge of sustaining a complex and enlightened civilization, and that it simply took a couple (almost literally) of anecdotical and testimonial, in the technological context, and nitpicked manipulated texts in the case of textual heritage and tradition, as sustaining elements of their new parodic new Christian order.
Did the church preserve the industry and agricultural productivity, the communication, trade, monetary, urban and general social system of the Roman Empire? did Rome "fall" trying to preserve that but, oh, the church DID succeed?

The church at least tried, at the beginning.

And now you're changing your claim, again. No one could have preserved everything you're grabbing at now.

They are at least open and explicit in their references, while the claims of fundamental dogmas about the Virgin Mary have more in common with old pagan traditions that with anything that can be found IN the Bible. Of course, you can always poke as much as you want AROUND the Bible.

So now they're okay because they're honest about their heterodoxy?

You keep slipping around -- "moving the goalposts", I think it's called.

[Kulindahr]

At the risk of being political . . . .

[Kulindahr]

Intro in German, English, French, Spanish and, finally, Latin. Why do you ask?

Whoa -- I'm envious! Mine has German and Latin.

I also have an old Greek New Testament where the critical apparatus explanation/description is in Latin but the scholarly introduction is in German while the edition introduction is in English.

[Kulindahr]

omg! i have been saying this for years!

Then you're clueless.

That's as good a description of Christianity as saying that the Democratic Party is a conspiracy to keep Americans divided and slowly introduce socialism in order to turn it over to communists.

[Kulindahr]

Why God created man.

I can't stop laughing!

[Thynight]

[Thynight]

I think the main picture is already in the thread, but I can't remember.

[Kulindahr]

In the last two posts, four of the images merely show the ignorance of the person who made the image, two are childish, two are sadly true.

I have no idea how many Mikey would find blasphemous -- but definitely a majority.

[Kulindahr]

[Thynight]

[Thynight]

In the last two posts, four of the images merely show the ignorance of the person who made the image, two are childish, two are sadly true.

What about the other two?

[Quantumreading]

I can't get over the fact of how butthurt Kulindahr is. Can't you give us one thread without your hilarious claims?

[Kulindahr]

What about the other two?

They were funny.


BTW, Jefferson wasn't exactly a non-believer; he was a Deist with Theist leanings.

[Kulindahr]

I can't get over the fact of how butthurt Kulindahr is. Can't you give us one thread without your hilarious claims?

I don't like ignorance, so I oppose it. I don't care if it's in religion, science, history, or politics. If you think that correcting ignorance is "hilarious", I feel sad for you.

As bankside said, get educated first.

[Quantumreading]

I don't like ignorance, so I oppose it. I don't care if it's in religion, science, history, or politics. If you think that correcting ignorance is "hilarious", I feel sad for you.

As bankside said, get educated first.

I feel sad for people who believe I'm ignorant when they ignore common sense every day of their lives.

[johaninsc]

...
I have no idea how many Mikey would find blasphemous -- but definitely a majority.

I would take a guess and say at least all of mine...

there might be one exception..not really sure


I posted so many

[Kulindahr]

I feel sad for people who believe I'm ignorant when they ignore common sense every day of their lives.

Well, given that you just demonstrated that you pull opinions out of thin air that aren't connected to what you were responding to, I doubt you have much common sense to work with.

If you claim to be not ignorant, then please, without resorting to online research, give me two arguments for and two against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, comparing and contrasting them.

[Kulindahr]

I would take a guess and say at least all of mine...

there might be one exception..not really sure


I posted so many

Yes, you have, and some were real zingers.

I haven't counted the candidates for actually being blasphemous, after his assertion, but I doubt it was any more than the two before it.

Did you post the one with God playing with Adam's erection?

[johaninsc]

Did you post the one with God playing with Adam's erection?

no, I believe that was Thynight's post

..very funny


oh yeah, even though I'm not a "believer" anymore, I still read the Bible on occasion.
Old Testament, mostly...it's because of my interest in Biblical archaeology

[ChickenGuy]

As good a time as any to ask Kuli his opinion....

....on this VERY simple question....

....who created God?

[belamo]

You said something like the Bible is a mass of contradictions. That's false.
The only defense of your position on the Bible that's been made is Fundamentalist picking and choosing, refusing to read it as a whole book.

My "falsehoods" are called "reading the whole book" and using scholarship.

Ha! Well, then elaborate your scholarship, because what you state there is just as good as saying the contrary.

A "whole book": the Old Testament is as different from the New as Judaism from Christianism, simply because the Old are the books of the Jewish Bible carrying the word of the god they don't even know exactly how to call, YHVH, and the New the Evangiles of the word of Christ the Son of God... you just take Matthew from chapter 5, when Jesus Christ says that He didn't come to ablosih, but to fulfill the law, and then he goes on referring to old laws and mending them with His Word. Keep comparing both schizophrenic parts: THAT'S reading "the whole book".

The "fundamentalist" position is taking "the whole" and dissolving the contradictions by sloppily referring to it all as "the whole". A general judgment always skips the details where the devil is hiding.

[bankside]

Ha! Well, then elaborate your scholarship, because what you state there is just as good as saying the contrary.

A "whole book": the Old Testament is as different from the New as Judaism from Christianism, simply because the Old are the books of the Jewish Bible carrying the word of the god they don't even know exactly how to call, YHVH, and the New the Evangiles of the word of Christ the Son of God... you just take Matthew from chapter 5, when Jesus Christ says that He didn't come to ablosih, but to fulfill the law, and then he goes on referring to old laws and mending them with His Word. Keep comparing both schizophrenic parts: THAT'S reading "the whole book".

The "fundamentalist" position is taking "the whole" and dissolving the contradictions by sloppily referring to it all as "the whole". A general judgment always skips the details where the devil is hiding.

Belamo, there is nothing internally illogical about that either; the contradiction disappears if you assert that the new testament really was intended to represent a revolution. A whole new order of things. You wouldn't expect continuity; indeed if you were mathematically minded you might call Jesus the Divine Asymptote. It's like asking in puzzlement why we never saw more pictures of Lenin with the Czars after about 1918.

Resolving that question does leave another thread to pull however: in christian mythology, why was the malevolent god of the old testament not overthrown by jesus or denounced as a fake? Was this not a proper revolution? Or, why was this God less about smiting and more about pragmatic happy forgiveness? Why didn't he just send another great flood to correct people's behaviour as in noah's day? Had God grown morally? Were we supposed to turn the other cheek towards god himself for the petty tyrannical rules he imposed on the peoples of the old testament? For the unjust punishments and tyranny between men done correctly in God's name? Forgive him for condoning genocide?

The answer to that one, as I understand it (and again it is at least internally coherent) is that the forgiveness and love of the new testament were a gift from god suited to the times. But also that the brutality and capriciousness of the old testament were a gift from god suited to the times. Happy birthday.

That does provide a coherent answer to the question. Phrased in the somewhat creepy religious language of shepherds and sheep, father and child: we give a baby knives and cudgels to play with on the first occasion, then after a sufficient period we give the baby another gift of bandages, salve, and teddy bears.

There are an awful lot of good internally coherent answers for all these skeptical questions. It is only in looking, as we have learned is important, at the whole broad scope of the scholarship where it becomes possible to say….nooooo, I just don't think that's likely.

[Kulindahr]

As good a time as any to ask Kuli his opinion....

....on this VERY simple question....

....who created God?

The question is wrong. It's like asking both "Who made water wet?" and "Who built the Alps?" The word "created" doesn't apply to God.

[Kulindahr]

Ha! Well, then elaborate your scholarship, because what you state there is just as good as saying the contrary.

A "whole book": the Old Testament is as different from the New as Judaism from Christianism, simply because the Old are the books of the Jewish Bible carrying the word of the god they don't even know exactly how to call, YHVH, and the New the Evangiles of the word of Christ the Son of God... you just take Matthew from chapter 5, when Jesus Christ says that He didn't come to ablosih, but to fulfill the law, and then he goes on referring to old laws and mending them with His Word. Keep comparing both schizophrenic parts: THAT'S reading "the whole book".

The "fundamentalist" position is taking "the whole" and dissolving the contradictions by sloppily referring to it all as "the whole". A general judgment always skips the details where the devil is hiding.

So you throw out particle theory because sometimes a particle behaves like a wave and other times it behaves like a particle?

No -- you tackle the apparent contradiction to find the truth it hides.

[bankside]

The question is wrong. It's like asking both "Who made water wet?" and "Who built the Alps?" The word "created" doesn't apply to God.

It was Slartibartfast who built the fjords. I daresay he did the Alps too.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbNtlS69HhU[/ame]
(on topic video too!)

[Der Freiherr]

I wish they would make this....!