I'd rather hear your answers, because he's avoided the harder questions for some reason, and really didn't make the effort to address all of what I asked of you - so to repeat:
You seem to be among those that mistakenly think the bible said the world was flat.
I don't care what it says - I have no sway either way. What I want to know, are things in the Bible "Not" Literal? For example, in 1 Samuel 2:8 where it says "...for the pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he hath set the world upon them.", do you interpret this to mean the Earth is literally set on Pillars?
As mentioned before, the blood sacrifices and other things that God had Israel do all pointed to Jesus, and also lessons they needed to learn, such as not lying to God.
Ahh, a loving, bloodthirsty God. Got it. but Why the sacrifices, where destroying his creation and bloodletting it back to him via fire makes any sense? He Created It! Why would he then make rules requiring his creation to destroy his other creations and bloodlet it back to him by flame and smoke? Does Jesus need the blood to surrogate an offering to himself when he kills himself to serve as a loophole for rules he put in place to start with?
The One born that day or celebrated being born on that day is the point actually, not pagan practices of old.
Perhaps to you as a Christian - to me, it's a holiday and a time to celebrate the love and company of family and friends, something Jesus wasn't really a fan of. These celebrations were in place a long time before Christianity was around.
If the Almighty chose to be born on some day that some demon god or emperor also celebrated...who really cares?
Well, You as it turns out - You're the one claiming that Jesus! is the One and Only Reason for the Winter Solstice celebrations - and that simply isn't the case at all. We've even determined that nobody actually knows when Jesus was born (if he existed as a single source for all the stories in the first place), let alone that December 25th is that day...
For a God who wanted to offer salvation to the world, there's a terrible lot of stuff he forgot to cover.
Why question God? He had to pick sinners of some sort, there is no one else on earth.
I'm still not convinced Gods even exist - but to answer your question - Because these aren't the actions of a God of all creation. It sounds more like a wargod of a particular tribe that too many people hundreds, or thousands of years after the fact, have retroactively latched onto as the creator of the universe.
They are not the same either. So?
So he didn't care for his word to be widely understood and followed.... like a Tribal Wargod rather than an all-knowing creator of the universe.
In other words records of people before writing was part of man's experiences. So?
So the human race was never reduced to just 8 examples on a methane choked boat for a year. There's no genetic radiation entirely from the middle east at any point in the history of humans. Therefore, a Worldwide Flood that wiped out everyone except Noah and his family, is literally impossible.
I agree they'd be different, and those differences would leave very obvious tell-tale signs that wouldn't be missed when we observe them today.
Well, this is just plain wrong. All of the evidence we have shows no difference in any state past. We can see stars billions of light years away as they were billions of years ago, We can tell their compositions, sizes and distances, all of which would not correlate in any different state past. Change any underlying laws of physics for any state past and we would at the very least, see wildly differing results in the observations we get - each star would give readings that show it to be both very far away, and untenably close at the same time - we just don't see this. In more dramatic changes, we wouldn't even know distant stars were there and/or life wouldn't have existed here until this state we know of existed.
Endogenous retroviruses is one - mutation rates are another...
