Excuse interruption, please.
David, I’m having trouble with the Atheist Religion thread. It’s taking an awful long time to display. Been waiting about five minutes or more already. Do you think the long court cases are having an effect on it?
Wait a minute. Nevermind. Must have been a glitch. It looks like the second case never posted. I’ll try it again. Thanks.
Back to regular thread…
It’s working fine for me. Probably just a server burp; hit refresh a couple times. Or maybe it’s the Wrath of God, in which case pray for Him to have mercy on our poor thread.
You can see the second case? Hmmm, well it’s still cogitating over in the other window, and I hit submit just maybe a couple minutes after my post here. (It was still on my clipboard and was so big that it took about fifteen seconds to paste in the textbox.)
I can’t see the second post, but for God’s sake don’t hit the submit button twice. That’s how we get 15 65,000 word posts in a row (well, aside from Ph*****s). Trust in the UBB cgi and its servers. Check it on another browser if it times out, and if it didn’t post, then try to resubmit. We may have a word limit on posts, too, so you might try breaking it up.
Lib, are you still blaming everything that goes wrong on poor Glitch? 
Guess I could blame a fire in my fly! 
If we agree that God and Yaweh are the same fella, can we add the post-biblical Waco numbers?
I’ve started a, “Get some folks an ‘O’ key” fund, before the inevitable “my '-'key is worn out” complaint begins.
Mary Hart’s Legs:
Please note the last three words in the title of this thread.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Keller is so bright,his ‘O’ can’t wear out. Viva la’-’.
CM, all of the Eguptians were guilty? Not one felt bad about what happened? Not one child said to herself,“I feel bad because my friend is treated like a slave.”?
This is exactly the attitude that allows the genocide of a race, the attitude of,“None of these sub-humans are worth sorting through and saving, so it’s o.k. to murder them all.”
Would you mind re-thinking that statement of yours, CM, because I expected much better from you.
slythe:
First of all, the Egyptians were not wiped out in their entirety. Second of all, it’s unlikely that the Egyptians considered the slaves their friends. Thirdly, to answer the main thrust of your point, I don’t (from a religious viewpoint) have the sound basis to question G-d’s ideas of justice. As a religious believer, that’s just one of those things I accept on faith. But the Bible hardly names any specific Egyptians, (heck, it doesn’t name that many Israelits!) so it would be a bit much to expect it to contain a census of every Egyptian first-born and a detailed justification for his death. All I can say, from my limited knowledge, was that in the broad sense, the Egyptians were a bad bunch. For me to say, “Well, what did little Thutmose from Pithom do to deserve to be included in this plague?” is just to ask a question that I know I’ll never hear the answer to. Maybe it’s an answer that would have satisfied me and you. Maybe not. In that case, I must rely on my faith to tell me it would.
Of course, you can question this as much as you want and decide that the lack of an answer is not satisfactory. But you haven’t made a judgment based on hearing an answer you deemed unsatisfactory…you just don’t have an answer.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Sounds like sophistry to me, CM. I think it’s a fair assumption that not every single first-born Egyptian child was innately evil, and therefore deserving of an untimely death. But they all got wiped out anyway. (Talk about the sins of the father being visited upon the son!) It all seems pretty arbitrary and unjust to me.
“Every time you think you weaken the nation!” --M. Howard
Sheesh, is nobody willing to help me with the Sodom and Gomorrah thing? Here’s what I’ve figured out (making the totally unwarranted assumption that the cities are roughly identical in size).
Step 1) What is the minimum possible population? In Genesis 18, Abraham asks God, “Suppose there were fifty innocent people in [Sodom]; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?” This question implies that fifty is only a small fraction of the total population of Sodom – perhaps a tenth at most. Also, Abraham is probably talking about adult males, the only segment of the population who seem to be judged according to their deserts. There is no indication that the women and children of Sodom have committed any misdeeds, but if (like Lot’s married daughters, whose husbands have a chance to leave but refuse) they happen to be the chattel of the wrong guy, they’re just SOL. (In fact, if women counted as people, the total number of righteous people in Sodom would be at least eight – Lot, his wife, four or more daughters, and two or more sons-in-law … enough to give the Lord serious pause.) So if we figure that adult males comprise about 1/4 of the population, we get a minimum estimate of 2,000 people in each city.
Step 2) What is the maximum possible population? This is where it gets interesting. In Genesis 14, the kings of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar go to war against the kings of Shinar, Ellasar, Elam, and Goiim. We don’t get a whole lot of information about the relative sizes of these places, except that Zoar is a little one-horse town (Genesis 19:20). If there are 500 adult males in each of the two largest cities, perhaps there are about 100 in Zoar and the other two places, making the minimum total size of the army 1,300. The army of Shinar et al. is probably the same size or larger (they win, after all, and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fall into some bitumen pits while fleeing).
When Abraham hears that Lot has been captured along with the other men of Sodom, “he mustered three hundred and eighteen of his retainers, born in his house, and went in pursuit as far as Dan. He and his party deployed against them at night, defeated them, and pursued them as far as Hobah.” Now, if my previous calculations are in the ballpark, Abraham and his men are outnumbered by at least four to one. It’s just conceiveable that 319 men might defeat 1,300 in a surprise attack, but they surely wouldn’t be able to do anything of the sort if the army of the four kings was much bigger than the theoretical minimum.
Conclusion: there are about 4,000 people in Sodom and Gomorrah, 3,996 of whom perished when the cities were destroyed. (You were expecting NYC, maybe? This is in the middle of the desert.)
Since everybody else on this thread is so interested in the firstborn of Egypt, they can jolly well calculate their numbers themselves…
I think apathy, depression, irony, and confusion are damned fine ways to view a world going to hell.
– Cynthia Heimel
spoke-
The only way I can answer that is to say, neither of us were there, so lacking first-hand information, we’ve only got one source on which to base our opinions, and our opinions are inextricably tied to our opinions of the reliability of that source.
Fretful:
Just to be nitpicky about this, according to the Bible, Sodom wasn’t a desert area until after G-d destroyed it. Prior to the destruction, it is said to be fertile, “like the garden of G-d”.
Chaim Mattis Keller
Seraphim wrote that God killed an unnamed number of retreating Amorite soldiers in Joshua ch. 10.
In my opinion, this hardly scratches the surface as to the number of people God killed in Joshua ch. 10 – not directly by striking them down with a holy firebolt or anything, but indirectly, by ordering the Israelite army to eradicate every living man, woman, and child in the Canaanite cities they took over.
viz Joshua 10:28-40, NIV translation (emphases mine):
While God didn’t kill all these civilians Himself, he did command the Israelites to do it for Him. (I suppose the Isrealites could have disobeyed, but they knew what ol’ Yahweh would have done to them if they did.)
cmkeller, can you honestly assert that it is possible that every single Egyptian first-born could be guilty of sins punishable by death? If that is your assertion, than you have lost any slim chance there might have been to draw me into the folds of religion. If this is what is meant by “blind faith”, I’ll just keep my eyes open, thank you very much. Such hatefulness of a large group of people is very unbecoming of you.
Oh, damn, cmk, you’re right of course. All the more reason why somebody who actually knows something about religion should take over this task…
I think apathy, depression, irony, and confusion are damned fine ways to view a world going to hell.
– Cynthia Heimel
ENITY 1 Physical animal not a supernatural being
Genesis 3 : 1 (KJV) Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made …
Genesis 3 : 14 (KJV) So the Lord God said to the serpent : Because you have done this , you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every best of the field; on your belly you shall go …
ENITY 2 Supernatural being the adversary ( not the Prince of darkness or a (devils plural mentioned in OT)demon or any OT false God )
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and SATAN also came among them
ENITY 3 NEW Testement The Prince of This World, The Tempter, refered to numerous times too many list
Therfore Only those deaths which can be laid to #3 should count … any lawyers to help on this …
Sorry to bring back and old Thread but there are lots of things I wish to post this weekend and this was the perfect starting point. In the interest of my time limits excuse the shortness and seemingly randomness of this Post
What it should say on the back is “Thou shal not kill???”