On the contrary. The issue in the OP is ‘what falsifiable claims do the Holy Books make’. Seems to me we can very usefully narrow the field by discarding at the outset claims of the miraculous as falling within the realm of the mythological and so, by definition, outside the realm of debate.
Still remaining is a whole load of stuff that may well be either historical or mythological - for example, the career of King David, who may have been as historical as Alfred the Great, or may have been as (non) historical as the medieval romance of King Arthur … the point can usefully be debated. In fact, opinion has swung both ways over the last few decades - before the discovery of the Tel Dan Stele, pretty well everyone believed David was more on the “medieval Arthur” side, but now he’s inching a bit over to the ‘perhaps not wholly mythological’ side …
There can be no useful debate over (say) whether a great flood once covered the whole earth and killed everyone except Noah & Co. They are myths. They depict events that could not physically happen.
So - if we eliminate the ‘miraculous’ and the “clearly not possible” claims from the bible, whats left to discuss? The exisstence of ‘individuals’ that may/may not match the biblical description? Would the ‘exodus’ as described be open for debate? or are we going to handwave that it “ahppened, but the story in the bible has been exagerated” ?
How about historical or scientific claims that don’t match up with reality, such as person A was present a event B when it can be shown that person A wasn’t alive during that period of time, or that substance A has characteristic B when it can be shown that it clearly doesn’t. Neither type of example can be excused by miracle or parable.
I don’t know how we ‘prove’ that someone was -not- alive - or at place A - the ‘person was dead but at x location’ will be handwaved away as a miracle or editing error.
The scientific claims I agree with - but I don’t know how many of them are left if we eliminate all of the ‘clearly not possible’ or ‘myth builders’ from the bible.
Where did I say anything about my personal theory about the firmament? What are you going on about?
And, would you like to cite my “personal attack”?
As far as that tree here a cite from wiki :
*The strength of Daniel 4:10-11 as an argument for a flat Earth is considerably reduced by the fact that this part of the Book of Daniel recounts a dream experienced by the Persian king during a fit of madness. Thus, it does not necessarily refer to an actually existing tree or make any statements about real cosmology. * So, it’s a dream by a madman. There was no tree. Thus no falsifiable claims.
You really should stop debating about a book of which you have no knowledge. It’s embarassing.
Oh, and it’s the Tower of *Babel. * :rolleyes: It’s based upon the Ziggurat at Babylon, of which Nebuchadnezzar wrote ""A former king built the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. "
See, “Seven Lights of the Earth” which are the seven heavenly bodies. Thus we have a tower, which was built to go “unto” heaven, and which never got completed due to " people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words".
Damn, pretty much as per Genesis, except with out all that Yahweh stuff. The opposite of a false claim. The writers took a cool story, added some details and god stuff and turned it ito a nifty moral tale.
*You really should stop debating about a book of which you have no knowledge. It’s embarassing. *
You’re not arguing anything here about “falsifiable claims that the holy books make” you’re just bringing up the same tedious and overused stories that are used to show the OT God was pretty damn vengeful. So what? :rolleyes:
Read the damn OP and stick to it. Want to debate if the Judeo-Christian god is a nice guy or not, start another of a string a a thousand threads about this. It’s boring, tedious, threadshitting *and *a hijack.
The homepage you link to is certainly anti-Islamic, and explicitly pro-Christian to boot. Not that any of that necessarily discredits the scholarship, but it makes me somewhat cautious. A link to a published work by a leading scholar would be much appreciated.
Who conquered all of Canaan. Yeah, right.
The question is Biblical claims. We can best define that by what people thought was claimed by the Bible to happen before science and archeology showed most of the claims to be nonsense. I doubt that anyone ever thought the Song of Solomon was anything but poetry. On the other hand, I don’t think that many people doubted either the Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, or the Flood.
And excluding miracles is absurd. The story is supposed to be about a very powerful, at least, supernatural being. Do you doubt that readers 1,000 years ago thought he could do all that stuff?
If I were on a jury and a witness told the kinds of stories that are in the Bible, I wouldn’t believe him when he gave his name without a second source. I wouldn’t assume that anything he said that I couldn’t falsify immediately was true.
HAHA, “the opposite of a false claim.” OK…if I recount the superman story and claim it as proof that I am Clark Kent that doesn’t make you are Lois Lane!!
The writers took a cool story, added some details and god stuff and turned it ito a nifty moral tale with almost the entire bible.
They did the same with the creation myth, and with the flood myth which is from the Book of Gilgamesh.
But the big deal is that these stories are just told as any “moral tale” They are told to establish the hebrew got of war as a legitimate power.
Just like they stole from the story of Hercules err Dionysus err Osiris err…Mithra to make up many of the Jesus myths.
None if this changes the fact that the concept of the firmament is pervasive in the books of the bible. The fact that it is viewed as possible and normal for things to be taken to the “corners of the earth” and that a tree (or in the NT mountain) were the entire world were viewable fits in with my posts and cites. Nothing you have returned with gives even a shred of evidence that the writers thought that the world was a sphere.
And you ask me to cite your personal attacks and then you end your post with an ad hominem…which is a personal attack?
This has been debunked, esp as the Roman Mithras came after Jesus. Again, you really have to learn something about what you’re posting about.
We still talk today about “the seven seas” and the “far corners of the earth” today- allusions.
Here’s a book on Amazon:
“The Plant Hunters: True Stories of Their Daring Adventures to the Far Corners of the Earth “
Do you think Anita Silvey thinks the earth is flat?
Nor did Daniel say you could view the world from a tree- didn’t you read my post? A dream of a mad man, not supposed to be a real tree. The King is mad *because *he thinks there’s a tree that tall.
Umm, I never claimed the writers thought the world was a sphere.
Look, it’s not a personal attack to tell you you’re wrong and you’re wrong due to your complete lack of specialized knowledge in this area. I don’t know much about quarks, so I don’t post in threads about sub-atomic physics.
You *don’t *know what you’re talking about, you have been wrong every single post, time after time. Wrong due to ignorance of the subject.
Do you seriously think that people can’t see how disingenuous your posts are? If somebody claims a certain section of the Bible is not metaphorical, you mock him because the Song of Solomon, which had nothing to do with his post, is metaphorical. If somebody notes that a flat earth was a common belief thousands of years ago, you mock him because a 21st’century book uses a stock phrase about the four corners of the earth.
It’s a slimy tactic. And it’s not fooling anyone. Nobody thinks that Eratosthenes wrote the Bible, and was just waxing poetic.
Fruit trees growing before the sun was created. Nonsense.
A worldwide flood no more than a few thousand years ago, with all land animals wiped out, except those on the ark. Nonsense.
Some two million people, and their flocks and herds, wandering around the Sinai for 40 years, without leaving a trace. Nonsense.
A worldwide census that required everyone to drop whatever he was doing, and journey to the town where his ancestors lived a thousand years earlier. Nonsense. I wonder what the Gauls and Germans thought when the Roman forts were abandoned for several months.
Dead Jewish saints coming out of their tombs and walking the streets of Jerusalem, where many people saw them. Nonsense. Even the other gospel writers wouldn’t touch it.
Address those points, rather than bringing up totally irrelevant, inappropriate, and frankly stupid analogies, if you can.
Lots. What about what I said in my post? I will repeat it:
If you reat the OT, what you find is that there is lots of stuff in it that may, or may not, shed light on actual history.
A good way to tell the difference, is to see whether stuff in the OT can be corroborated by non-Biblical sources. For example, the existence of several Hebrew monarchs is known to be ‘real’ because they are depicted on contemporary Assyrian stele (as supplicants).
Note that the inscription leaves plenty of room for debate - real debate - over who the king so depicted was:
Such debate is a lot more fruitful of actual results, than arguing over (say) the Biblical flood.
Supposedly God made the sun stand still in the heavens for an entire day so that Joshua could kick butt and take names. Why did none of the other civilizations on Earth, such as the Chinese or the Greeks, happen to notice this event?
Well, there are four explanations: either false, a miracle, figurative or the archeological explanation. That is possibly in the translation and what is known of the Amorites, they were all about Sun/moon omens. Basically, Joshua delayed the battle for a day so that the Amorites had bad omens. In other words, we’re just reading it wrong.
Like Troy (from the Iliad), Jericho was for a time presumed to be a fictional location from a fictional account.
The claim of the historical existance of a historical Jericho, was a falsifiable claim, like the claim of the historical existance of a historical Troy.
It is the nature of falsifiable claims that sometimes no falsification is achieved. The Bible is full of falsifiable historical claims: although it is now recognised as the main historical document for a chunk of world history, there was a time when many scholors believed it to be entirely fictitious. That belief was not supported by subsequent archeology.
But you totally ignored the first part of the statement which is a great tactic if you are trying to distract someone from the meat of the argument.
The “err…Mithra” was a bit-o-humor showing that the major plot line had been reused more times than Kurosawa’s work in modern times. This is why it is useless to try and debate with you, you ignore the big points and dwell on the minutia. The creation myth and the flood story and the slaughter at Jericho are all stories that were included in an attempt to establish divine provenance for Yahweh.
If they can be proven to be minor revisions of myths co-opted from near by societies and there is no evidence that they did actually happen in parallel or series they are falsified as to their function. If Yahweh’s best effort in assisting is that he kills 20 children at Jerico, as you claimed above, Joshua has no reason to follow him out of fear nor reverence,
If the creation myth is just a cute story there is no “original sin”. A concept that is critical for the modern Christians.
If you can show that the early Hebrew’s didn’t believe that the earth was a flattish dome set on pillars and protected from the waters of above “heaven” you would re-write the history of western cosmology.
Yet all you can muster in return is random ad hominem attacks. I freely request other members debate me on these points but I feel that it is a waste of my time to to continue this with out unless you come back with some real cites.
I am not going to waste my time with someone who doesn’t know the difference between Jericho (which Joshua “fit”) and the Massacre of the Innocents by Herod the Great some 1200 years later.
Once you have some degree of knowledge about the subject at hand then come back. Bring pie.
