Yo’re implying that the account of Goldilocks and the three ursines isn’t literally true?!?!
I beg you to reconsider; look at the evidence all around us - rocking chairs, beds and hot porridge are not hard to find.
I was raised Catholic and I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, of all things seen and unseen. I’ve been to the museum and looked at the reproduced skeleton of Sue, the T-Rex.
A man wrote that God created the Earth in seven days. He didn’t mention Sue in the garden of Eden. I think there were a lot of things that man didn’t mention. I think there was a lot he added and left out, being a human man. I believe in Christ, so that makes me a Christian, even though I was raised Catholic. I accept the Big Bang and Sue. I believe in God and dinosaurs and a lot of other things.
Well, the question is a bit queasy. Not all cosmologists “believe in” it either. See Top Ten Problems with the Big Bang for example
**Duck Duck Goose wrote:
I’m a Christian, and I believe in the Big Bang and the 12 billion-year-old universe, or whatever the figure is this week.**
Yeah, why can’t those scientists make up their minds? They talk about using facts! Why don’t they just count the candles on the universe’s birthday cake next time around and figure it ou!
Do you know how long it takes to count to 12 billion?
Well Jack Chick’s tract In the Beginning says otherwise but this Christian doesn’t believe science is a threat to faith. Jack’s brand of fundimentalism doesn’t represent most Christians. heck, I’m stil trying to find the verse that says hiring a good illustrator is an abomination unto the lord. The creation account in Genesis was written for the contemporary audience who had a different understanding of the world than we do now. I don’t presume to know what God thinks but I don’t think he intended Genesis to be a blueprint for the universe.
This is certainly not the case. The biblical account WAS the universe in miedeval times, even up to the 19th century for many. Perhaps they deviated a little, and at different place at different times in different ways, but for the most part the worldview of chrisendom has resided in the literal bible. Consider the attempts to reconcile Aristotelianism with creation, and make them compatible (with the bible deemed more truthful than Aristotelianism) Also, consider the attempt to account for the varying races of the earth in the early exploration age via biblical ancestry, only later giving way to anthropology, giving way to sociology in more modern times. In any case, the Black race was often considered descendants of Ham, (a naughty son of Noah’s I believe). Also, I can tell you from reviewing many of the missionary accounts of New England that the origins (in biblical terms) of Native Americans is something to be thought over (in strictly biblical terms). Taking a literal interpretation of the bible and trying to use it to explain the world is certainly not new or original.
It’s true the Bible never mentions dinosaurs.
The Bible also never mentions cats. Do they exist?
—Well personally I believe that if Jesus didnt exist, christianity would still be a valid religion. Im also willing to understand the bible as any other great work of religion or philosophy, even if everything in it is metaphorical.—
Bravo!
—The Bible also never mentions cats.—
More the pity…
The Bible also makes no mention of tobacco, or smoking in general. (The only references to pipes are of the musical sort, as in Matthew 11:17.)
It’s astonishing, I think, that a practice vociferously condemned as “filthy” by no less a personage than King James I in 1604, barely a hundred years after tobacco’s introduction to Europe, would go entirely unmentioned in a work supposedly authored by God or His agents. You’d think the Supreme Being would have an opinion on it, one way or another, even if it was a warning in advance.
So should we conclude from this total lack of information that the good Christian must not partake, as tobacco must be so awful that it cannot even be mentioned in Scripture? Or, by contrast, does its absence indicate its insignificance to the moral code, unworthy of even passing reference, and that a Christian can make whatever choice he likes with respect to the activity?
(Or could it be that the ancient people who wrote these stories would obviously have nothing to say about a plant they didn’t know about and that their ancestors wouldn’t encounter until millennia hence? Native American creation tales, similarly, don’t mention the horse, an animal they wouldn’t see until it arrived with Europeans, but they do discuss tobacco and its uses quite extensively.)
The point is, a Christian can believe in whatever he or she wants, and can find Scriptural support for that belief by looking hard enough. There’s no guarantee, however, that any other Christian will accept that belief and interpretation.
Actually, cats do get a mention in the Apocrypha, in A Letter of Jeremiah, verse 22: “Bats and swallows and birds of all kinds perch on their heads and bodies, and cats do the same.” It’s apparently referring to idols of false gods in Babylon. No, I hadn’t heard of this book either, until I looked up cats out of curiosity.
CJ
Fighting my own ignorance since 19[coding error]
Hmm, yes it does sound a little like they’re guessing. If they can’t make up their minds, why believe them over what God’s words says? What’s so hard to believe about God creating the world in 7 days? Aren’t you putting Him in a box and saying, no you couldn’t have done that? "And the evening and the morning were the first, second, third, etc. day means just what it says: literal days and nights. Can’t figure what’s so hard to believe about that.
If God created the universe in seven days, ~six thousand years ago, why does everything look much older?
This trick is known as argumentum ad ignorantiam (argument from ignorance) - since it cannot (at present) be established whether the age of the universe is 12 or 15 billion years, we make the amazing leap that it must have been 7 days.
I know I’m a Christian.
I believe that God made the universe and everything in it.
I have absolutely no clue about how God did this, however. I’ll leave that one up to the experts (cosmologists) to figure it out.
I do find it interesting when people believe that anything not mentioned by the bible doesn’t exist, or is evil. People who feel that there can be no alien life anywhere else in the universe because there is no mention of it in the bible.
I’m of the opinion that the reason varius things aren’t mentioned in the bible is because there is no reason to. Why are dinosaurs not mentioned? Because the book is about Humans and their spirtual relationship to God (and a few other things). Why are aliens not mentioned, if they exist? What do aliens have to do with the bible? It is not a chronological history of the universe, it is not a universal encyclopedia of everything and never claims to be.
Such things that do not fall within the scope of the book should not matter when they are excluded. Unless aliens or dinos or techology has something to do with what’s being said, there is no need to mention it.
**H4E wrote:
Hmm, yes it does sound a little like they’re guessing. If they can’t make up their minds, why believe them over what God’s words says? What’s so hard to believe about God creating the world in 7 days? Aren’t you putting Him in a box and saying, no you couldn’t have done that? "And the evening and the morning were the first, second, third, etc. day means just what it says: literal days and nights. Can’t figure what’s so hard to believe about that.**
Watch out, H4E, that one nearly hit the top of your head!
Is a lion a cat? There are 177 mentions of lions.
A lion is a cat, but not all cats are lions 
By “modern” I don’t mean “new” or “original”. I mean in the modern era.
I’m guided here by tomndebb’s post in this thread, where he says:
*“ Our whole notion of historiography as an accurate rendering of the facts of history is fairly recent. Prior to the eighteenth century, historical accounts were seen as Literature that explained truths. There was no wrangling over whether an event took place in a particular way. After an event had been described in one or two (or several) conflicting versions, later writers would incorporate all the conflicting versions into their accounts, usually dismissing those versions that made a different moral point than they intended while doing little to reconcile the conflicts within the multiple versions of each story.
Leaving aside the poetry and the prayers, nearly all of Scripture is History in one form or another. As such, it was subject to the rules in effect while it was written. It was only after the eighteenth century movement to take History out of Literature and place it on a nearly scientific footing that people began to worry about whether the historical passages of the Bible had to be treated as journal-like facts.”*
Yes, in the medieval period people accepted that the bible was probably, factually, the best account of creation (and other events) that we had. When other evidence came along, they tried to reconcile it with the bible, because a theory which fits all the available evidence is better than one which fits some only. If they couldn’t reconcile scripture with other evidence, and had to reject one, they preferred to reject the other evidence, because they did regard the scripture as divinely inspired. But they wouldn’t insist on the the factual truth of scripture in the face of irrefutable evidence.
They could see, as we can, that scripture wasn’t a complete account, that it contained internal contradictions, and so forth. The also understood the points tomndebb makes, perhaps better than we do. I don’t think that the absolute factual correctness of everything stated in scripture became a basic test of faith until quite late on.
It’s significant, I think, that the “flat earth” view was supported by scripture, but was ultimately rejected on scientific grounds in the pre-modern era. We have no records of burnings at the stake over this, no accusations of heresy, no condemnations. It doesn’t appear to have been much of a problem from a religious point of view.
By the time Galileo comes along in the Seventeenth Century, this issue is much more fraught. Galileo is something of a borderline case, in fact, since the heliocentric view has already been published without anybody being accused of heresy. But whether it is the fashion in which Galileo chooses to state his arguments, or the fact that Florence is a great deal closer to Rome than Warsaw was, or the defensive insecurity of the Roman Church in light of the advances of Protestantism at that particular moment, or all of these things, Galileo is accused of heresy – not, signficantly, because he espouses the heliocentric view, but because of what he is believed to imply about the authority of scripture in the way that he presents his case.
And, by the time the evolution controversy comes along, we can see that the scripturalists are no longer interested in reviewing any non-scriptural evidence at all. Not only is scripture wholly true, as far as they are concerned, but all necessary or relevant truth is contained in scripture. No observation of the external world can add anything material to what scripture tells us about the subjects of which it treats. This, I think, is a distinctively protestant (and therefore modern) contribution, coming from the emphasis placed on “sola scriptura” as a source of the truth revealed by God.