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I confess to not knowing a good answer to that!Why should laws continue to exist and why should they be sustained indefinitely? What say you?
Either way, you have to come up with an explanation of prophecy. Based on what is available and what is known, what is more reasonable? How does Daniel 9, written before the fall of Jerusalem, know these details? You say they were smuggled in after the fact. But we have writings dated before the fact. Hundreds of different prophecies predict the Messiah, people verify that Jesus is that Messiah. And the NT apostles go to their deaths proclaiming not only this but that He has been raised from the dead.
There is any number of 'experts' we could both cite, but I don't see the point. Sorry if that is disappointing, but I can't write anything better than what is easily available in the web and you are bound to be familiar with it.
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@Outplayz
Of course, if you are wrong you won't know you're wrong!
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@Outplayz
I suppose its conceivable that something very odd happens at the point of death, but nothing in my own experience implies it will!
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@Outplayz
i don't know if you ever been under general anaesthesia but my experience of it is, well, there is no experience. There is no period of blackness just 'before' and 'after' butted up against each other. I have no experience of anything before my brain came into being and my consiousness is eliminatted by sleep or a smll quantity of anaesthetic. That my consciousness can survive the destruction of my brain runs counter to my experience ofbeing a conscious entity.
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@PGA2.0
I don't think it is neccessary to demonstrate that people are capable of being dishonest; it is neccesary to demonstrate people have clairvoyant powers! You have been banging on about reasonableness. What is the more reasonable explanation - a spot of dishonesty or the gross violation of every known law of physics?
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@Outplayz
The metaphor I favour is that the brain is a dynamo and consciousness is the electicity it generates. As long as the dynamo is turning it produces electricity; it can stop or be stopped and restarted, corresponding to periods of sleep or unconsciousness.
Death is when the 'dynamo' gets irrepairably broken - then consciousness ends (as it does under general anaesthetic), never to return. The electricity of a broken dynamo doesn't go anywhere - it ceases to be.
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@PGA2.0
But predicting where the Messiah would be born, when, details of His life, and how He would die, instigated but not physically put to death by His own people but at the hands of the Romans. How do you predict this stuff?
It's clearly impossible.
What is not impossible is for the evanglists to deliberately add or tweak their accounts to make it appear a 'prophesy' was fulfilled. Both Luke and Matthew would surely have been familiar with micah 5:2
“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times.”
M and L's nativity stories attempt to solve the problem that Jesus inconveniently came from Nazareth, not Bethlehem. When you note that all it takes is the gospellers could read and copy bits from the old scriptures into their stories it seems a lot less impressive!
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@Vader
Say what you like, at least Muslims have the right idea how to deal with homosexuals.
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@janesix
I am not sure what 'grace' refers to... it seems to have something to with god being nice without us having earned it, so if he answers a prayer it is an example of His grace and if He doesn't answer it - well, tough. We cannot demand or earn anything of god - anything we get is through his 'grace' alone.
I am not saying you didn't experience something profound - I am only saying that 'grace' is a technical, theological term that might not be stricty appropriate if one is being pedantic - and I can be very pedantic!
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@Mopac
Except when you don't want Him to be undivided, such when He is Father and Son or even Father, Son and only Ghost. Sometimes it seems you want your cae and eat it.
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@Mopac
Dualism means two sides exist, not that they are evenly matched.
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@Mopac
Like shooting spitballs at the sun.
What is?
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@Mopac
Together with the devil are his hosts of wicked angelic powers who have rebelled against the goodness of God and seek to pervert and destroy God’s good creation.
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@Mopac
If there was no duality there would be no 'The Dark' for 'the Light' to overcome.
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@Outplayz
Do you have any tangible reason for that belief?my only real belief or sorta intuitive belief is that we will survive death.
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@Mopac
In fact, the devil can't even overcome a man unless said man allows the devil to.
I don't think that is what matters about a dualism. Certainly Christianity is 'officially' monotheistic, but many Christians think in terms of a competiton between 'good' and 'evil' with God/Jesus on one side and the devil on the other. Doctrine may forbid a good Christian from calling the devil 'a god' but a man from Mars might think it's a very fine line!
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@Discipulus_Didicit
The earlier stories of the Bible existed long before Christianity and the modern concept of Satan began to exist. That is the reason it is not recorded as being Satan who tricked the first woman, it it is not because Genesis is placed in the same collection of stories that later mention Satan and people were expected to connect the dots. It is because the stories of Genesis existed for hundreds of years before the stories of Satan.
I wouldn't put it in terms of the existence of stories. In monotheism there is one god and that's it. In a dualistic faith there is a good god and a bad god.
The Hebrew were monotheistic so while individuals could do wicked things they were certainly not gods. The serpent was one such individual.
For the Hebrew priests, Satan was a loyal servant of the one god. Satan had no autonomy because that would have smacked of dualism, undermining the sole authority of YHWH. Satan could not have tempted Eve unless (as in the story of Job) he was instructed to by YHWH.
However it is probable that dualism is a very natural thing to fall into and Christianty today is almost explicitly dualistic - while denying it vehemently!
But i don't think Genesis mentions a serpent not Satan just because they hadn't thought up Satan yet - it's more subtle than that.
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@Mopac
I'm not sure about broadening things beyond gen 1-3. The issue - as I understand it - is whether the details of that story are 'folk memories' or 'revealed truths', because only if they are folk tales would chinese whispers come into it.
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@Mopac
I think it's safe to say that no one took notes of what happened on the first five days! If it's true then God must have told the writers of Genesis what to write. "Telling what to write" is loosely 'dictating'.
it's a bit like how sportsmen do their 'autobiographies' using a ghost writer to do the actual text - but I don't know the word for that so I said 'dictating'; it's near enough (or i thought it was near enough!)
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@Tradesecret
Because Jesus took me and changed my life completely.
A good reason to believe Jesus is real, but j6 asked
How do you know Jesus is real?
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@ronjs
You have to ask 'if the flood story wasn't in the bible, what in the world would make anyone think there had been a deluge?'
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@Mopac
You are taking 'dictated' more literally than I intended!
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@Tradesecret
Chinese whispers don't come into it. If you are a believer then the scribes wrote down what was dictated to them by God. If you a disbeliever the whole thng is just made up. Either way the text is not a 'chinese whipered' version of what happened.
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@disgusted
Chinese whispers don't come into it. If you are a believer then the scribes wrote down what was dictated to them by God. If you a disbeliever the whole thng is just made up. Either way the text is not a 'chinese whipered' version of what happened.
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@PGA2.0
Concerning Jesus' ministry and death—Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, O Daughter of Zion! Shout, Daughter of Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
What is jesus riding on? Luke clears it up that just one animal is involved: Lk 19:30 "He told them, “Go into the next village, where you will find a young donkey that has never been ridden. Untie the donkey and bring it here. 31 If anyone asks why you are doing that, just say, ‘The Lord[a] needs it.’” Which makes sense; Zechariah is using poetic repetition.
But in Mathew we read "They brought the donkey and the colt and placed their cloaks on them for Jesus to sit on." Quite clearly two animals. Not only that but jesus sits on them both - presumbly like some sort of circus act! It seems likely that Matthew didn't identify the poetic aspect and took Zechariah literally. In other words he wasn't a witness but adapted what he found in the old scripture to construct his tale.
That is how there are so many 'fulfilled prophesies' - Matthew picked something out of t"he OT (such as casting lots for jesus cloak) and added a suitable "fulflment" into the narrative. It's not a fulfilled prophesy that, for example, judas received 30 pieces of silver as per OT prophecy - Matthew simply copied the amount given in Zechariah (he mistakenly says jeremiah, but there is nothing like that in jeremiah).
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@3RU7AL
Are you assuming any credibility to the Abraham legend? There are many reasons to suppose he is no more real than Adam and Eve. Abram translates as 'Exalted Father' and is renamed by YHWH as Abraham ('father of many') (Gen 17:5). The aptness of the names can hardly be accidental!
I am very much a 'minimalist' - I think there is practically no reliable history in the pentateuch.
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@janesix
I'm pretty sure there are exoplanets but i am less sure many will turn out to have life. I am 'agnostic' about the multi-verse. My impression is the maths behind it is hard and we lay-folk tend to get the dumbed down version. Any opinion I had about it would be practically a wild guess.
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@Mopac
He's a meteorologist.I don't get it.
The point being made is he makes predictions that come true yet he is not supernatural.
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@janesix
I wouldn't call it a theory
Neither would I really.
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inhabited exoplanets is a theory that many physicists today are seriously discussing. They remain divided on the issue, but if we assume for the sake of discussion that they exist, then to theists, I ask:
Do you believe there would be a different God for each planet, or one God over them all? If the latter, do you think God's values and commands would change from planet to planet, as befitting their fundamental differences? If you believe in an afterlife, would you expect to see souls from other planets there? Or would it be one afterlife per planet? Do we share heaven with little green angels?
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@3RU7AL
You may enjoy this BBC radio podcast on linguistic philosophy. Not quite as dry as it seems!
c.20MB.
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@Mopac
What do you base your notion that atheists don't believe in truth on? It seems to me that you base it on an idosyncratic theory that god and truth are interchangeable synonyms. That is what I flatly reject.If they don't believe truth, why make exception in language!
I do not reject truth or reality - and if you like I will even call it a god, but you want reality to be God. That is you don't merely demand that reality 'is' (which is not indispute) but that 'reality so loved the world that it gave its only begotten son... etc', that reality hears and answers prayers and damns sinners to hell.
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@Mopac
As I said in the post you responded to but didn't read, it is a matter of language not reverence.
I read it - it wasn't the first time you have referenced MW! My view is that dictionaries do not actually define words. What they do is do their best to describe how words tend to be used, or have been used in the past. MW tell us the word 'God' is used - or has been used - to refer to 'ultimate reality' - which is not the same thing as guaranteeing that God is 'ultimate reality', whatever the rather pretentious phrase 'ultimate reality' means!
Chances are you don't want spend weeks reading Wittgenstein, so here is a nice short article on his theory of language.
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@EtrnlVw
It seems to me that it is extremely difficult for a westerner to adjust to hindu thinking. Nor is the problem made any easier by the many schools of hindu philosophy.
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@Mopac
Fair enough, but I don't see the point of avoiding using capital G, or even capital H in He, Him and His etc. It's a long standing typographic convention. I think avoiding or ignoring traditional capitalisation is a bit 'tokenist' - but it's mostly a matter of personal taste and old habits.And lets not pretend you have reverence for any of these gods, because you don't believe any of them exist. You don't even believe in the big G.
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@Tradesecret
I am under the impression that traditionally it has been assumed Moses was inspired what to write by God. I think that originally scripture would have been taken to be authored by God, even if the actual writing down was 'obviously' done by priestly scribes. The identity of the scribe or scribes was irrelevant. There is nothing in the text to imply moses wrote the Pentateuch - presumably it arose as a sort of early 'urban myth'!
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@Polytheist-Witch
There doesn't need to be proof - there is enough evidence for PGA to believe He existed. There's not enough for me to believe it, but PGA and I are clearly very different people! For me, there is enough evidence to believe it's all down to physics. When the available evidence falls short of actual proof it comes down to personal preference.
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@Mopac
The word "Gods" is a nonsensical word, because there cannot be 2 ultimate realities.
nonsense. People have been talking about Roman gods and Greek gods and norse gods since 'forever'. it is your private crusade to rede'fine the word 'G/god' that makes you say something as monumentally absurd as "The word "Gods" is a nonsensical word" when its been part of the English language for thousands of years.
If however you object only to the capital G then I submit it is only that you want to honour your god over the gods of the hindus. I have no reason to honour your 'God' over their 'Gods'. I choose to show repect by captalising the G for both where the sense requires it (except when i can't be bothered to fix it!)
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@Outplayz
That's more than enough about mopac's parts and those of his wife. There are parts of both i have no interest in being aware of.In what way does saying you have to be careful of the parts of yourself that you don't notice lack self awareness? One of the first steps in self actualizing is understanding the parts of yourself that others see and you don't. Hence, you are struggling with those parts and partly in denial until you understand them. If you think that lacks self awareness then you are really sticking fast to the adage... and so is your wife.
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@Mopac
I know that NOW!
That must be a new sort of fallacy - "it can't be true because it made my wife laugh'. I'd call it 'ad spousum'.
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@Mopac
by the way, I insist that you capitalize God
"The Gods" should be translated "The gods"
You demand a capital g for your god and small g for Hindu gods... that is how religious wars start!
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@Mopac
I have mentioned this in another topic before that the Hindu word for "God" is Brahman.
They are comparable but there are major differences between the Arahamic God and Brahman.
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@Mopac
As it would be, because gods are not God. These "gods" are created beings, while God is Uncreated, and truly The Eternally Existing One.
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@Castin
Surely there's no need to go as far as other universes.... would there be little green aliens in heaven?
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