Hey people who hate the Bible so much, how many books have you written?

I don't hate the Bible. I hate what you people try to use it for.

The Bible is a fascinating collection of historical manuscripts. Understood in that context, and no more, it's fine, and actually quite interesting.

But when you say crap like "the Bible is the revealed word of God" and "people should lead their lives in accordance with God's teachings as set out in the Bible", that's when I object.

Who are "you people"? I'm not religious.

People should take on board, if nothing else, the teachings of Christ in the New Testament, as they are very relevant and optimistic ethical guidelines derived from Bhuddist lore.

Have you read The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine? If not, go and pick it up

I like a lot of the stuff in the Bible but if I read it every day that's a little OTT is it not, like watching Finding Nemo or The Incredibles time and time again, that's great for kids but surely not grown adults

The Bible is a story, not a manuscript. It teaches lessons; it does not teach life.

A set of stories I should say ^

Also may I add the Bible is a historical work. Things like Adam and Eve and the great flood have since been verified by science, and it documents the history of Judea pretty well

The Bible is *taught* to be word of God, it's for both adults and children (And if you don't believe that, read Song of Solomon, it's very adult.). There are things in the Bible that don't make sense anymore, yes, but you're a *Christian* the laws in the Old Testament aren't meant to be followed. And if you say they are, chuck everything out of your closet that isn't 100% one type of fabric, that's against the rules in Leviticus. Same goes with you women marrying more than one, that's against the rules in Leviticus too. And no shellfish, pork, or things not prepared in über clean ways. You see my point here? How may of those rules do you follow today?

Now I'm not saying it is 100% absolutely true, it's a book that's been translated over. And over. And over. And is still being translated. Many Christians can't agree on what books belong in it, and still more can't agree on who is a Christian. It has moral lessons in it that are great, it has ones in it that aren't so great.

And Jamiet, you're missing the point of it. If you're not Christian or Jewish, ignore what people say about it, it's as easy as that. It's always been a religious book, not a history book, not a science book, deal with the fact that people take it as more than that and move on.

And SYnapse, Adam and Eve haven't entirely been verified by science in the way it's put in the Bible.

Not as a couple, but its been determined that all modern humans have a common mitochonrdial ancestor Adam and Eve

The Bible is a Semitic writing. The people that wrote originally told the stories (and passed it down to those that began to write it) had no clue that "all modern humans have a common mitochondrial ancestor" SYnapse. That's absurd.

Mitochondrial DNA also only follows the DNA of the mother, not the father, and if such is true, then we shouldn't have gotten to this point due to complications due to inbreeding at that point in time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

And you magically think that the Semites or Hebrews or Jesus people had any idea about that, SYnapse?

Yes.

Intuitively they knew that the Universe came from nothing, what we call the Big Bang they called the Word.

They knew that there had been a great flood, which we have now discovered.

They knew that humans had a common ancestor, which they called Adam and Eve, now we call it Homo genus, or DNA ancestry.

All of this is not surprising when you consider that Greek mathematicians were capable of measuring the circumference of the Earth, or that ancient hominids built things like Stonehenge and ancient calendars

You think Adam and Eve might be a metaphor? You know that they have a story and that the point of that isn't to portray the creation of man but the creation of the world and the intellectual "elevation" of man? Adam and Eve is not a scientific peer-reviewed paper, SYnapse.

SYnapse - the "fact" we all have a common female ancestor does not support the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. Firstly DNA is only the best science we have today we may find, for example, that the DNA of each part of the DNA disproves the common ancestor theory. Also the common ancestor is believed to be in Africa, she is likely to have had other females around her and her "ADAM" is unlikely to be our common male ancestor. Also she lived around 200,000 years ago, before the Biblical Earth even existed.

@SYnapse,
"They knew that there had been a great flood, which we have now discovered."

Actually, what we've discovered is that there have been a number of great cataclysmic floods... the tidal wave that is believed to have wiped out the Minoan civilization, a separate one that essentially flooded the Black Sea basin out entirely, several ice-flow floods of geological significance in the Northwestern US, etc. Ironically, while some Christians have embraced this as evidence of a factual basis for the Noah story, many Literalists have vehemently rejected it because it is not the global flood described in Genesis.

Maniac - Hecks.

I'm not saying that the Bible was omnipotent and knew the history of Earth, on the contrary I'm saying that what it DOES say about the Earth has somewhat been verified

rofl @ synapse :) that's the funniest thing ever.....

@ SYnapse: "Who are "you people"? I'm not religious."

I'm sorry, I misunderstood your apparent defence of the Bible as a pro-Christian statement. I apologise for my error.

@ dark_seraph: "And Jamiet, you're missing the point of it. If you're not Christian or Jewish, ignore what people say about it, it's as easy as that."

I would be able to do that if it wasn't for evangelism.

Np Jamiet. I'm an atheist and always will be, however I think that religion is a very positive element of the world (although it can be corrupted) and I hate to see people arguing against its existence. Would such people argue against the existence of art? Wagner caused the Nazis as much as Christianity caused the Crusades. Both art and religion in this case are part of human nature that we should not attempt to remove

@YJ,

God needs no excusing or defense from me. The very thought of my excusing God for something is absurd. Hecks rightly pointed to the passage in Job that underscores this.

I am merely trying to explain a right perspective on what happened to jamiet, in hopes of removing an obstacle to his believing the truth. I presume that his question was asked in a spirit of honest inquiry, and am attempting to answer in that spirit.

@jamiet,

"However, God kills the baby before it actually commits any such acts, surely? So at the point at which God murders it, the baby has not sinned. No?"

A great question, and one I don't know the answer to (though David, at least, held, although in precisely what sense is unclear, that he was sinful from conception). Whatever the spiritual and moral life of infants, it is in any case such that it is not wrong of God to introduce them to a world where they are subject to death. As I said before, a great many infants die. If it is not wrong of God for Him to let those infants die when he is not directly punishing any action (or at least we're not told that He is), how could it be more wrong for Him, vis-a-vis this infant, to cause its death when punishment of an act WAS one of his motivations? If He's not wronging a baby when it dies, then He's not wronging a baby when it dies. And if He is, then He is. (He's not).

Your moral intuition, I think, is coming from human-perspective morals. Humans do owe each other life in the sense that it is wrong of them to take each other's lives (except in capital punishment). God owes us no such thing. Life is an undeserved, indeed, anti-deserved gift, and God does not wrong us when He removes it.

"Yes, but what we're talking about here is your concept of justice. I put it to you that God's decision to kill this particular baby, which has done nothing wrong (and has not sinned), in order to inflict a punishment not on the baby, but on someone else, is fundamentally unjust. I challenge you to defend how this can possibly represent, as you put it "dealing justly" with the baby."

He dealt justly with the baby because He did not take any actions on the baby that He had no right to take. It would be wrong of us humans to punish somebody other than the person who committed a crime, because we have the right to punish another human only when that human has committed murder or some such crime.

God, on the other hand, owes life to nobody. Restricting attention only to His interactions with the baby, and leaving David and everybody else out of it, we find that the child was born, and soon died. In this, God did not violate any duty toward the baby (unlike the case of us, if we killed the child).

I hope that is helpful at all.

Drat, I posted this on the wrong thread. :-) I'll go post it on the right one.

Evangelism means nothing to me. While Christians are supposed to evangelize, you *don't* have to listen. You can choose not to. The best defense, and yes I know this is a bit of a stupid statement, is really to *simply ignore it.* It's not hurting you for them to evangelize, they have a right to do so, and you have as much right to say you don't care.

"Not as a couple, but its been determined that all modern humans have a common mitochonrdial ancestor Adam and Eve"

Who didn't live at the same time & co-existed with thousands of other humans.

"Intuitively they knew that the Universe came from nothing, what we call the Big Bang they called the Word."

The Big Bang didn't come from 'nothing'. It came, allegedly, from quantum field vacuum states, which are arrangements of physical things. The quantum fields are there, so there is not nothing.

Also, the biblical story claimed the universe was a firmament/vault. It also claimed the sun was 'created' after the earth, among other impossible things.

'Also may I add the Bible is a historical work. Things like Adam and Eve and
the great flood have since been verified by science, and it documents the
history of Judea pretty well'

You may indeed add, it is wrong, but that's ok because you're allowed be wrong.

The bible is not a historical work - it is a religious work, that doesn't mean it can't be used as a source - it tells you about what people of a particular religion thought and wrote down, though unfortunately it also has been altered so many times, translated, had books added and removed, etc. It is hard to say there is this one bible, to use as a proper source you need to look at all the different bible versions and understand why there are differences, and what that says about the authors.

Adam and Eve have nit been verified by science; the idea of a common ancestor and the idea of the first man and woman created from scrstch by God are not the same - the science of evolution, and the DNA evidence which shows that we have male and female common ancestors doesn't fit with Adam and Eve being the only humans around - the common ancestors (and they may have been generarions apart, though that is unclear) likely lived in groups and had social support.

The 'great flood' never engulfed the entire world.

The histor of Judea doesn't tell us a lot about life in Judea, it leaves out a huge amount of information while focusing on big events - kings, wars, plagues and laws. This leaves out all the important stuff about what life was actually like (because the authors and original readers knew what life was like, so didn't feel it was important enough to record) this leaves with a very incomplete idea of what happened in Judea during the time period. And very little of historic trends and changes - while much of the interesting history of the development of the early christian faith is wiped out completely as heretical.

'The Big Bang didn't come from 'nothing'. It came, allegedly, from quantum field
vacuum states, which are arrangements of physical things. The quantum
fields are there, so there is not nothing.' - no, we think that you can create a quantum foam from nothing, or at least Lawrence Krauss does - i need to read his book - a universe (space-time) spontaneously appearing from literally nothing, and rules of quantum physics along with it. This is pretty amazing.

'Who didn't live at the same time & co-existed with thousands of other humans.'

I've seen some recent studies which seem to indicate that previous estimates of the 200,000 (or so) year gap between the last common male ancestor and female ancestor is actually much smaller.

But yes, thousand of others.

Imagine, if you will, that there are 100 families, with one mother in each, and over time 99 of these families eventually produce no females (but one at a time inter-marry with the other remaining families, which may have multiple females or the second third and fourth generation) Eventually only females from 1 family are left, and so every female is descended from the one original mother (though the males have still descended from many different mothers, but because sperm doesn't contain mithacondrial DNA, that DNA is lost from the species - you still have a lot of genetic diversity from the 100 families carried in the nuclear DNA; like-wise, the same bottle-necking event can happen to the Y Chromosome, as no women carry a Y Chromosome, the res of the nuclear DNA ~ ie stuff On the oher 23 Chromosomes, can continue to have more genetic diversity...)