To my mind, a bad argument is a bad argument, even in a good cause. If the claim was "biblical literalism is demonstratably absurd because … " that would be different, but as seen in this thread, generally the argument is not so bounded.
No, he’s not a literalist. I thought so too, and looked at some of his past threads, and he’s not. He is, though, extremely conservative, thought I don’t believe he wants the term “fundamentalist” applied to him either.
Pretty typical with a lot of them, yes.
Sure they do. And the literalists claim a perfect Bible, and the radio station in my example claims the right time.
NIST sets the standard, using a well documented means, but also checks it against reality, and adjusts it every so often by adding or subtracting a second - no Reformation required!
I admire your attempt to put yourself in the shoes of the theists, but you can’t seem to bend your mind around to providing a good explanation of how they choose what to believe and what not to believe, except through edict. That statement is a compliment, by the way.
So you’re saying that my sources are rather wacky. I could have sworn that it was you who claimed that the Catholic Church had banned paper in the Middle Ages and offered, as evidence, the fact that this claim had been deleted from Wikipedia. I could also have sworn that after someone printed the relevant portion from the book that the erroneous statement on Wikipedia had cited, you vanished from the thread. And I could have sworn that all of this was the second time you’d trotted out this absurd claim, since I debunked it the first time you made it a year earlier. After that, perhaps you shouldn’t throw stones on the issue of sourcing. Most, though not all, of my cites go to academic books, papers, and websites, so I don’t think you’ve got any basis for claiming that my sources are too out there.
And this has what do to with the original intentions of the Jewish authors of the Old Testament? It looks to me like a complete non-sequiter. Wouldn’t you agree that if we wanted to know what those Jewish authors meant, we would research historic Jewish thought, not the though of people 10,000 miles away who never had any relationship to the Jews? Wouldn’t you agree that a much wiser approach would be study the opinions and philosophies of early Jewish writers such as Philo, to understand the different genres of early Jewish writing, to look for clues within the text of the Bible itself as well as non-canonical Jewish writings, and to do an in-depth of how the question of literal vs. allegorical has been treated throughout Jewish history. Wouldn’t you agree that that would be a lot better than linking to Wikipedia pages about ancient Japan?
because the best way to win a debate is to use your opponents information against them.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Close the thread.
Can you find an example of a serious discussion where an atheist makes that argument?
Does it matter? The Catholic church used to make essentially that argument while claiming Galileo’s ideas were heretical. If an atheist wanted to demonstrate the absurdity of biblical literalism with that example, there’s plenty of evidence for it.
Somewhat off-topic perhaps, but interesting (yet not interesting enough for a new thread):
From The New York Times:
You’re almost there. Yes, exactly, pointing out the contradictions in the bible forces Christians to offer the pissweak explanation that you just did on their behalf. The next step in the argument is to point out that the admission that it is necessary to assume interposed fallible witnesses to explain away the contradictions in the bible amounts to an admission that the bible is indistinguishable from something that is not the work of those witnesses and not a god. Consequently, it has no value in proving a god, or in deriving what the views of the god might be.
Sure, but the penny that hasn’t dropped with you is that if the religious guy’s watches tell the time no better than anyone else’s, the religious guy has no better claim to knowing the time than anyone else. Religious people commonly claim that their religion gives them an authoritative morality (in this analogy “a certain knowledge of the time”) that atheists must necessarily lack.
I fully appreciate that religious people can churn out rationalisations such as those you offer and that the strategy mentioned by the OP does not defeat those rationalisations as such. What the strategy does is to force religious people to adopt rationalisations that amount to admissions that their religion cannot be distinguished from shit someone made up.
Sorry, I misplaced a “not”.
I meant to say “The next step in the argument is to point out that the admission that it is necessary to assume interposed fallible witnesses to explain away the contradictions in the bible amounts to an admission that the bible is indistinguishable from something that is [del]not[/del] the work of those witnesses and not a god.”
A point that I might add is that it perhaps helps with understanding of the mock-the-bible-by-interpreting-it-literally argument to understand that it is primarily an argument against religion not the Christian god as such. A self contradictory bible is not incompatible with the existence of a god for reasons Malthus suggests. It is however an argument against the idea that religion rests on any convincing authority.
But doesn’t the “Christian god” spring from the religion that describes and promotes it?
Well, he could, in principle, exist seperate from the religion that describes him.
It might just describe him wrongly.
There are in fact loads of (semi-) religious people that no longer believe in the God as described in Bible, yet still “feel” there must be something.
The somethingites, most often, still call that something “God”.
Yes, generally. But as a matter of logic, the particular argument in question more directly undermines religious claims for the importance of the bible and only indirectly undermines the idea that there is a god.
Hence those versions of Christianity (such as Catholicism and Orthodoxy) that have legions of apparent back-up - such as the experience of mystics, saints and miracles - that act as corroboration.
What religious folks (or at least many of them) claim, is that the Bible is witness to a mystery that is corroborated through other means. In short, the text in the Bible is only some of the “clocks” available to them; the Catholics (for example) also have sacred traditions and the Magisterium, mystics and miracles. With all of these “clocks” pointing to one place, or so they claim, a divinity can be inferred from the totality of the evidence. Cherry-picking contradictions is thec weaker argument, in the face of this.
Naturally, all of this is simply a working out of mythology in a self-referential way, but you can’t break the cycle merely by proving that the witnesses are human and fallible. That is already known, and accounted for.
I’ll stop you at “what the strategy does is to force …”. This presumes that, absent “the strategy”, religious types will not have noticed the contradictions. However, religious types (at least the learned ones) have been studying this stuff ever since the beginning. The contradictions are well-known and the rationalisations already well established, so pointing out the contradictions as if they were some great new discovery simply plays into their well-worn narrative.
That’s why it isn’t a very good argument.
But if the description given them by the Bible is rejected, how is this entity described? From the Bible you get “all-knowing”, “all-seeing”, “all-powerful”, “creator of all there is”, “eternal”-take away these Biblical descriptions and what have you got?
I agree with you that it’s not a good argument for those learned scholars, nor for non-literal Christians. Can you comprehend the fact that not everyone falls into those groups?
The people I deal with are a different sort entirely. They’re people who think that “The Bible must be right because it’s the Word of God. You know it’s the Word of God because it says so, right there in the Bible!” is a perfectly fine and valid argument.
These people do not have centuries of rationalisation behind them. As I said before, they are not even aware of the contradictions and therefore have felt no need to rationalise them.
Which makes hyper-literalism a perfectly good argument to use with them.*
I also don’t give detailed biology lessons on evolution to three-year-olds who ask “where do babies come from”, nor advanced optics lectures when they ask “why is the sky blue”. Perhaps your mileage varies.
*Please note that, as a general rule, I don’t argue with these people at all. I used to sometimes when I was much younger, but I grew out of it. 
The only time I do these days is when someone gets in my face.
I think the notion of God came first, and was incorporated into the Bible. Thus, the gnostic gospels that incorporated a totally different notion of god. They eventually got filtered out, of course. Both the NT and the OT incorporate several different views of God, which religion, claiming that there is only one, tries to paper over.
According to whom? According to the Christians, it must surely be the other way around.