No, just fundamentalist Christians. Orthodox Jews don’t try to change textbooks in public schools, show up uninvited at your doorstep, or litter the world with tires emblazoned with slogans.
Good Year? 
I think it was a reference to the current Pit thread about discarded tires painted “Jesus Saves.”
interesting.
That’s what the Quran say’s.
Well I, as a christian, do take the bible literally, and much of that has to do with your very question of, “not believing so would undermine the validity of the bible.” If you can mantain that some of it isn’t true, then there isn’t much worth in believing any of it, as almost the whole bible is a sort of give and take so to speak. Jesus on multiple occasions reffers to the old testament, quoting it as if it were true and happened. I generally take the opinion of, if you don’t want to believe it, then don’t, but don’t say–well, essentially whats being asked here–“the whole of the bible shouldn’t be taken as truth”.
The problem I have with theism, is mainly this, "
“You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that–and shudder.”
– James 2:18-20 [NRSV]
You see, the bible points out that just believing that there is one God doesn’t win you much merit. I suppose you could make the argument that you wouldn’t even need to believe this passage if you didn’t believe the validity of the bible, yet (I also suppose this may depend on your personal reasons for being a theist), that would also undermine any reason for being a theist in the first place. As Paul said, if hes not telling the truth about Jesus,
“…Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
1 Corinthians 15:32
Hey, maybe after I’m dead I’ll be told that I was wrong, and evolution was what happened. However, as that seems to clearly contradict what the bible says as fact, I’ll happily go to the grave believing it.
Why do you believe in the literal truth of the Bible, which God had to produce through the fallible hand of man and choose to ignore the evidence God left himself in the forms of fossils, the geologic record, DNA sequences, and astronomy? Isn’t that putting man above God?
Not really, no. I see taking that evidence and turning it around to prove the bible wrong as putting man above God. When we think that our data gathering capabilities are above the literal truth that of his word that God gave is in the bible, it is then that we will be putting man above God. Now I’m certainly no scientist, yet some simple scientific things more then prove to me the verity of the bible. Whales found on mountaintops, boat-like objects in the same vicinity the bible says noah’s ark came to rest, and perhaps the one I find most funny, the fact that one of, if not the, largest oil reserves in the world are found right where the garden of Eden was. Even if I lacked all these things, however, the absolute proof of God for me is my personal relationship with him. So like I have said, I will gladly go to the grave believing in the whole lot of it.
Are you kidding?
Whales on mountain tops? Don’t you understand what this is actually evidence of?
Noah’s Ark found? It’s not true.
Garden of Eden and Petro Chemicals? What does this even mean?
I would say your assertions were laughable if they weren’t so sad. There is no evidence for the existence of God. Say you accept it on faith, that’s fine, but don’t mangle half-read news articles to support your fantasy.
The Genesis story is completely wrong because ignorant bronze-age men wrote it. It’s not their fault, but they simply didn’t have the answers.
I think the reference is to Eden having been where Iraq or some oil-rich Middle Eastern country is now.
What do you mean “taking the evidence and turning it around”? Once the evidence is in front of you, just look it.
Why is there a layer of igneous rock underneath a layer of sedimentary rock? There can only be so many possible explanations without resorting to ad-hoc magical thinking.
You seem to be putting man’s Book-interpreting capabilites above the literal truth of the rocks.
Books can be contrived. Rocks are real and don’t change, so the truth is preserved in them.
You do realize that they’ve found all the transitionary fossils, i.e. “missing links” in whale evolution, don’t you?
Oil reserves are usually trapped beneath layers of solid rock and they’re scattered here and there througout the world. It’s long been understood that oil comes from accumulated pockets of dead organisms that became trapped under layers of sediment and slowly cooked into oil. That’s why it’s calles “fossil” fuel. It can take millions of years. What can this possibly have to do with the Garden of Eden?
In order for something to be the truth, you have to prove it to others, not just to your own satisfaction.
You realize you have circular reasoning right? The Bible is the truth because the Bible says it is the truth. I think it’s sad that you are turning your back on God’s own evidence to put your trust in man.
Disclaimer-I know I masscred the quoting system…I can’t say I’m as tech savvy as I wish I could be. I put the quote things around your statments, I dont know why its doing mine.
Exactly my point…which is why when I completely know that a certain being is real, I just look at it and accept it.
When I start putting my trust in rocks rather then personal beings, I’ll maybe give these ideas some thought.
The funny thing I always notice about these sort of things, is that evolutionists always want christians to abandon all the things that we “made up” in the bible, to accept all the things evolutionists made up in their theory. The main problem here is, is that when you have so many people investigating science not objectively, as they would tell you, but so very subjectively, they find what they were looking for in the first place–proof that God doesn’t exist. The biggest thing todays science hides behind is, “oh well, it takes millions of years…so…yea.” Thats like me taking a watermelon and saying, “This is blue on the inside, but when you cut it open it turns red.” You’ll notice how I can’t prove I’m right, just as much as you can’t prove I’m wrong. People always talk of all the neanderthal skulls and whatnot that we’ve have found, yet, if you were to believe the bible, it tells that men used to be able to live as old as 900+ years…in which case, because the human skull never stops growing, would make humans have very neanderthall looking skulls.
Perhaps your not up to date on your sunday school history, so I’l clear it up. You see, the bible claims that a beautiful and wonderous, ‘Garden’ of Eden was said to be generally right where Kuwait is, perhaps a little southeast. This was its center, and as it isn’t specified how wide or long it was, it could have been on the smaller size, or almost as big as the middle east itself(I genreally subscribe to the latter option, owing to the widespread amounts of oil in the near regions) So you see, a forest so to speak, of these biblical proportions would, when covered with the amount of soil and water(from the flood[ha, do i know to push evolutionists buttons or what]), in turn, create the 2/3 of the worlds oil reserves that are now under the middle east.
Now this is an unfortunate travesty, as I’m gonna have to verbally(or…literally…?) assassinate you on this one. Actual truth can not, and is not, derived from a general consenus. You can line up a million people who tell me I’ll be fine from getting hit by a train head on, but I’ll be the first to tell you that I think I’ll pass. Christianity, a thousand years ago, was something ‘proven’ to everyone and therefore taken as truth, based on the very idea of your given statement.
Well…thats really not what I said. I said that I know its real because I see the efect this truth has on my life daily. The more I read and understand it, the more it affects me.
I’m just gonna snip it here because it is a train wreck. 
You “completely knowing” that the bible, Jesus and whatever are real isn’t evidence. People are self-deluded all the time. The fact is that there is no evidence for the existence of God and the bible is wrong time after time. It was written by bronze-age men who didn’t know what was going on. It’s like assuming a dude from the 1800s would know how to design a web page.
Evolution is supported by millions of peer-reviewed scientific articles, millions of experiments and all the data we’ve ever collected. It’s not a bunch of guys going, “I bet this means we used to be amphibians!” in lab coats. It’s complex stuff that you haven’t bothered to educate yourself about.
Scientists see evolution in the lab, it happens.
No it isn’t, what you’re describing is how religion is. You have a happy coincidence, you say “Oh thank Jesus!” You have a bad coincidence, you say “Oh, he works in mysterious ways!” Science would ask why you think a watermelon is blue and would work out a test (say opening one in a vacuum) to see if it’s true. Science is based on fact and religion is based on wishful thinking and ignorance.
Dude, the level of ignorance you’re betraying here is embarrassing. There is evidence that the world is very, very old. We can see it in the ratio of radioactive elements, we can see it in the size and scope of the universe and we can see it in the biology around us. It isn’t a couple guys saying, “The world is very old!” with no evidence behind it. It’s millions of experiments and observations.
And on your side you have a book written by bronze age men who didn’t know enough to wash their hands when poking an open wound.
The location of Eden isn’t agreed upon and it isn’t in the bible. Why do you believe that it’s there? You are randomly deciding to believe what a specific human has told you.
There wasn’t a world wide flood. And floods don’t cause oil.
But the thing is, rocks don’t lie. They have no reason to lie because they’re just rocks. People lie or get the wrong impression and books are written by people.
Nope. You’re bearing false witness about how science works.
Scientists approach a question the way detectives approach a crime scene. They look at all the pieces of evidence and how they’re arranged and work their way backwards to piece together the sequence of events that led to everything laying around in their current position.
When the early geologists starting trying to find out how old the Earth was, they didn’t start out with tho notion that it was millions–let alone billions–of years old. But as they looked at layer upon layer of strata, it became clear that the Earth had to have been much much older in order for all that stuff to have gotten laid down like that.
And of course plate tectonics have moved the continents around thousands of miles at the rate of an inch per year.
Sorry, but you blew it. Of course the truth is not based on consensus, but there are not separate truths based on separate relationships with God. The standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” sets up a very narrow leeway that applies to everyone equally in assessing the alleged truth of a particular claim.
But in this case, you’re the one claiming that it’s the truth that you’ll be fine from getting hit by a train. Most of the million people have a “reasonable doubt”, to say the least, that you’ll be fine.
So saying that you’ll die happy believing that something you can’t prove is true is hardly enough to overthrow the conventional science about what happens when the irrepressible force meets the flimsy object.
We actually it is what you said, since you quoted Bible verses to show that the Bible was correct. But we’ll put that aside for a moment.
If parts of the Bible were not literally true, and Satan was trying to convince people that God’s work is less awesome than it is by tricking them into thinking it is only 6,000 years old, how could you tell? It may be Satan and demons that are causing you to deny God’s own evidence, and instead rely on a book written by fallible men. Remember, we are all born sinners. How can you trust a sinner to have written down God’s words without any errors? Only God is perfect, and he has left you the magnificence of nature to show his majesty. It is defying him to ignore his own handiworks and rely on the words of men that may have been influenced by demons.
Again…thats not what I said. I was giving bible quotes to curtis, in an argument against theism, and more specifically, creationist evolution. He believes that some parts of the bible may be true, but not others, and that sort of thinking was what I was arguing against. I quite clearly said in a later post the reason I believe it is because of the personal relationship I have with a higher being…but putting that aside…
“…how could you tell?” I could tell, becuase when many parts of the bible say that everything in it is true, then some of it not being true would invalidate that statement. When some of it starts to be invalidated, then you will find that the whole bible begins to quickly unravel. The writers of the bible will often remind us that what they are writing is not their own opinion, but given to them from God. (Now I understand you don’t believe this, yet I still want you to see why what your saying is not the case) The bible also says that nothing will be removed from it until everythings said and done. It quite clearly points out that it is all inspired by God, not demons, and that it would be defying him to choose to not believe in it. Now again, I understand you don’t believe this, but I’m just trying to show you that there is no middle ground.
But once again you are using the contents of the Bible to validate the Bible. If Satan influenced the writers to put some misinformation in the Bible isn’t that exactly what he would have them put in?
You have nature, which God created by his own hand, yet you are ignoring God’s own work to rely on man’s transcription of what God said. Jesus said that man is born a sinner, so how can you trust what they wrote? Doesn’t it make more sense to look directly at the evidence God has left? It’s a sin to waste the reasoning power that God bestowed upon you.
I fixed Hold Fast’s quote tags in post 73.
Hold Fast, to quote another poster, put {quote} before the part you want to quote, and {/quote} afterward. Except use square brackets: instead of curly. In your post, you had the tags reversed. You were starting the quotes with {/quote} and ending them with {quote}.