Noah's Ark

OldWiseGuy said:

I'm not trying to prove it to anyone. I'm just explaining my beliefs. I believe many things unrelated to the bible that people find silly but work very well for me. My understanding of the flood is a work in progress. I think up new things all the time. The narrative was written on paper, not in stone.

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That's cool. Your personal beliefs are your personal beliefs. What I find most interesting in this site, is not what someone believes or doesn't believe, but the claims they make about their beliefs and how they justify them.

AV1611VET said:

You said that is why they lost their belief, and I'm asking you what belief it is they lost.

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The could not longer believe in your God. It became obvious to them that he was a creation of man.

If you call that 'my misunderstanding', that's your prerogative.

But you're the one dodging the question, not I.

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When you can't ask a clear and honest question you can't accuse others of dodging.

AV, what if I posted some of the pictures of horrors caused by those that were done by Christians and claimed it was "Christianity justifying its beliefs"? I would be banned for doing so. Too bad that is rule is not applied evenly.

AV1611VET said:

This is Christianity justifying their beliefs:

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How ironic. That is a "graven image".

OldWiseGuy said:

Study it honestly

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There you go again. You assume that since I didn't arrive where you are I was doing it wrong or dishonestly.

I understand how you are justifiably scared of the possibility of what it means for someone to arrive at a different conclusion from you, but do be aware that "No True Scotsman" is still a fallacy.

and God will reveal the meanings.

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The meanings were quite clear, thanks.

There are levels of understanding only attainable by first accepting the literal text. The whole thing is eventually spiritually discerned, not scientifically understood.

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So long as it doesn't allow for intellect to understand it I am afraid it is useless to me.

Regarding science; science is the study of the 'natural' or 'steady state' of the supernatural creation. It's all magic you know.

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It probably looks like that to those who wish to stop the advance of human understanding a couple thousand years back.

Subduction Zone said:

How ironic. That is a "graven image".

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What's the image?

AV1611VET said:

Lost what belief?

If they were saved, then read the Bible and chose to be an atheist, then I have to believe it's not because they don't believe in God ... it's because they're mortified at what they read.

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It's a bit more complicated than you would feel comfortable with. Atheism to theists is very hard to understand or accept. It means a flaw somewhere in the system.

I sense that the way believers view atheists is more related to confusion and fear.

As Subduction points out it is the null hypothesis. Just as the existence of the Biblical Flood should be studied.

Now I didn't start off an atheist but that's likely because I had no choice in the matter. I was, like everyone else in the midwest US raised from the cradle to believe there was some form of God, not a particularly fire and brimstone type, but some type.

In that way one doesn't really get a chance to start with the null hypothesis (Ho: "There is no God") and test against it. Most of us have to stumble our way around trying to figure out why the exercise is trying to find a God when He seems so very absent or logically impossible etc.

We start off with a faith given to us and grow up accepting it as real and we come to a point where we wind up trying to test if it is real.

I had to work quite hard to understand the faith I had been "given". I came to some conclusions chief among them that if there was a God there were definite RULES and if those rules were not adhered to to the best of my ability or (gasp) if I said, thought or did something wrong it might be very bad. Now mind you, I was never TAUGHT by my family or my church that there was a fire and brimstone God, but the word was out on the street. It could be picked up elsewhere.

As I grew older and the feeling that I wasn't really connecting with "God" in any meaningful way was taking ahold, I was left with the FEAR alone. Fear of this God whom I was failing to connect with.

The only thing I had was my ability to assess the situation. I couldn't change reality, but I could observe. And read. And try to understand. Try to understand what the Bible said, what the thinkers said, what the holy men said.

And in the end I simply felt that the FEAR was not offset by anything positive in my life. In fact I could explain as much of the variability in my world without the God Concept and I could let go of some of the FEAR.

So here I am.

You can slice it and dice it and parse it as you wish, and the other Christians can pull it apart and tell me how I failed somehow to approach God in just the right way (like I was hunting a scared deer or something), but in the end if there is a God HE holds all the cards, so if there's a disconnect I can at least feel like I did my part to the best of my limited abilities.

The Flood, on the other hand, is a great hypothesis to start from the null: "There was no Noachian Flood". Let's test against that null hypothesis.

What do we see? ZERO evidence of that Flood, but a scrap of paper somewhere written by an unknown person claiming there was such a flood. Is that scrap a literal truth? Or is it a story? Is it a misperception by people with less knowledge of the rest of the earth than we have today? Hmmmm...all evidence points to it being a PERSON (or people) who wrote the story, so I'm going to assume that it could be false and at best is insufficient to make the prima facie case for The Flood.

Like the God-concept, I fail to believe in the Flood as well.

AV1611VET said:

You mean "their God" too?

You're not giving me enough information.

Are you talking about people who made a profession of faith at one time, and no longer do after reading the Bible?

Or are you talking about people who decided to read the Bible before they made a profession of faith?

(I think you know what's coming, so you're being vague about it. )

Who's "them"? born again Christians? or potentials?

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Please, ask proper questions if you want answers.

Try again.

Albion said:

What's the image?

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Both the picture and the Ten Commandments monument itself.

AV1611VET said:

This is Islam justifying their beliefs:

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What about this one?

(Those are German "witches")

or this one:

(those are Nuremburg's Jews in 1338 being burned for allegedly desecrating the Host)

Or this one:

This is science justifying their beliefs:

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You mean by producing life-saving drugs that heal the sick? Wow! Those evil evil monsters!

AV1611VET said:

I doubt you would be banned without being suspended first.

I could be wrong though.

If you posted pictures of horrors caused by those that were done by Christians and claimed it was "Christianity justifying its beliefs," you deserved to be moderated; since they were done in spite of the Bible, not with respect to It.

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The same could be said of your other pictures. The Muslims in 911 attacked the Twin Towers "in spite of the Koran". Your unknown pills were abused in spite of science.

Subduction Zone said:

AV, what if I posted some of the pictures of horrors caused by those that were done by Christians and claimed it was "Christianity justifying its beliefs"? I would be banned for doing so. Too bad that is rule is not applied evenly.

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You can be banned for posting historical pictures on CF?

Obliquinaut said:

You can be banned for posting historical pictures on CF?

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It depends upon your claims. If AV had posted the pictures you posted saying "this is Christianity justifying itself" he would have gotten into trouble.

AV1611VET said:

If you posted pictures of horrors caused by those that were done by Christians and claimed it was "Christianity justifying its beliefs," you deserved to be moderated; since they were done in spite of the Bible, not with respect to It.

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That sounds like a no-true-scotsman claim. Clearly many excesses were undertaken by Christians in the past precisely because they felt their faith was being attacked. The jews of Nuremburg were attacked with the predicate claim that they had desecrated the Host.

Now granted obviously they didn't actually probably do that, it was a convenient lie no doubt. But a lie that got people to feel "comfortable" to undertaking an excess and doing evil.

It would be WONDERFUL if no Christian actually found reason in the Bible to ever do anything bad! And indeed if you strip out big swaths of the O.T. you would be hard pressed to justify any evil done in God's name.

But religion doesn't work like that. NO BELIEF that cannot be supported by objective facts works like that! That is simply what one gets when one starts down the path of unjustified belief in humans!

Even the best of humans still hold unjustified beliefs and they are capable of doing immense evil as well as immense good, often using the same unjustified beliefs.

But you cannot in all rationality claim that the evil Christians of the past did was done without their personal feeling of justification by God's word (correctly or incorrectly). Just as many Muslims say 9/11 was done in spite of Islam.