I agree: it's a perfectly fair point: even if everyone was an non-believer, we'd still have assholes. Jesus may not have been the Son of any God, but he was definately right when he said that "And the assholes, you will always have with you." Or else that's what he SHOULD have said.:)
Of course, the Jews have quite a bit to say about the idea of their scriptures meaningfully being anyone's "Old Testament."
However, while we're noting times in the NT, the writings of Paul are probably the earliest of all, and the only documents that we are sure were, mostly, written by a particular known person.
He's correcting me, because just like PC freaks, he spends his time running around whining about penises based on his obsession against a particular political movement. I used "laypeople" without any special thought to the matter. The only busbody is him.
"When I have attempted to defend my point of view, you have refuted with broad assertions that I am obviously wrong. "
I've made arguments, with points to back them up. Did you really expect me to argue the opposite of the conclusions I've come to and the against my own arguments? Insetad of responding with your own arguments and conclusions, you have responded by increasingly trying to focus less on those arguments than on characterizing me and whatever you interpret as my tone or my attitude.
The problem is that anyone can make these sorts of character assertions, all to no purpose. Fine, claim that I have made broad assertions that you are obviously wrong. So what? The http://timecube.com/ guy can do the same. All of it is offtopic.
"For you to scornfully claim that it's obvious that Christian scholars are wrong is... rather uncharitable to say the least."
If I am uncharitable to that view, it is because I think that view is very wrongly given special respect based largely on status and power rather than on soundness. This isn't some view I've pulled out of the blue: it's something I conclude based on conduct and examination of those arguments.
Whether the text says virgin or not isn't some matter of opinion. It doesn't say virgin. For hundreds of years, no one THOUGHT it even implied virgin. For an unknown author of a tiny religious sect who may or may not have even known Hebrew to suddenly act like it both said virgin and was an unknown prophecy is, sorry, a little ridiculous and a terribly methodology for claiming that a prophecy has been fulfilled (particularly when, like the calling of Jesus Emmanuel in the text yet nowhere else, the gospel is the only primary source making the claim in the first place)
"Either you cannot or will not consider opinions other than yours. Your tone and word choice are well described by your word - arrogance. Your attitude is speaking so loudly that I cannot hear your intellect at all. I sincerely doubt that you are interested in hearing mine."
Again, you are alleging closemindedness and arrogance, but such allegations are really little different than slinging insults.
"Is it possible that your point of view is less than perfect?"
Of course. This is just another implied insult on your part instead of an argument.
"What evidence would be sufficient to demonstrate to you that Jesus is the Messiah? Is there any evidence that would be sufficient?"
Certainly. If it could be shown that Jesus: returned all the Jews to Israel. Redeemed Israel politically. Brought about world peace (instead of a sword), and brought all peoples to acknowledge God. That is what "the messiah" is, laid out very clearly (just like the law is repeatedly said to be eternal, not something that gets tossed out at some point in history because Paul has a dream about lobsters and Jesus is disdainful of the law).
All of this stuff about the messiah being born of a virgin, riding on two asses (because the author of the gospel didn't understand Scriptural poetic idiom and thought "an ass, foal of an ass" meant two animals), being the son of god: all of that was made up after the fact and is simply not part of the concept of the messiah as described by the prophets and outlined in greater detail in countless subsidiary traditions and documents.
Again: am I saying that any of this means that Jesus wasn't a great guy, or couldn't have been the son of god sent to save all humanity for its sins? No. The entire Torah tradition could be completely bunk, and Jesus the true hotness. But the idea that Jesus is the Jewish messiah consistent with the Torah simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny. And before you run off calling me arrogant again, yes: that is the argument that I am making.
I shot an insult, because in the end, that's the only thing that serves any purpose. Just as with the evolution debate, there comes a time when you realize that certain viewpoints have made themselves completely immune to any reasoned argument and you will only be wasting your time if you engage them.
Now, I happen to love reasoned argument. But if by some quirk of cosmic chance you happen to be a reasonable Schiavo groupie, then you can blame your irrational raving fellows for ruining any hope I might have that there is any point in having a discussion on this issue with someone that makes the same vile accusations and lousy arguments, or thinks that quacks and Senators watching videotapes is the same thing as "medical experts" or are innocent and without their own agendas or biases.
Then he should know better, end of story. If he's an expert on the retina, that's great, but it hardly makes him an expert in reading and interpreting CT scans. I stand by my point: a single CT scan like that should not be presented to laypeople as a highly dramatic proof that Schaivo was beyond recovery. It gives people a sense of knowledge that is essentially false or unwarranted when in fact the issue is much more complicated and reading CT scans not so simple.
Oh, and more importantly, we're generally there talking about very young developing brains. Early on, the brain is far more plastic and undifferntiated: like a poetic jell-o mold that hasn't set yet, it hasn't taken a shape that can be destroyed. But that doesn't last in adulthood. It's also worth noting that the structures being removed in these cases are, in fact the most undifferntiated and general purpose parts of the brain (the ones dealing with overall higher consciousness): not the specific structures I was talking about. A lot of people seem to think that hemimegalencephaly involves removing half the brain, but that's not really the case at all.
"If we took the time to talk about physics, red light, wavelengths and the expanding universe, it could become plain that red is sometimes red-shifted to another color. In order to really determine that we each understand the others' position, we'd need to lay the foundation."
Are you really claiming that the proof that Jesus is the messiah is this absurdly obscure? Doesn't that undermine your own claims about Jesus fulfilling all these prophecies if deciding so requires some very strained and particular interpretations of the text, after the fact?
"Just because you assert that "the scriptures are far better understood by the Jews" doesn't mean that they really understood what they claimed (or claim) to know."
Maybe, maybe not. But I should think that the presumption that scholars who actually read and spoke Hebrew should be prima facie more trusted than people who don't, and who demonstrably mistranslated the text in order to try and justify an ideological movement. That's not conclusive, but it's a point worth making as we look at the specific examples in order to understand who is saying what and why.
"but obviously it is pointless to have a reasonable conversation with you because apparently you already know everything."
What were you saying about ad hominem? I've made arguments. You can't refute them. So, predictably, you declare me arrogant or whatever to beg off.
Again, this is the problem when people use grand generalizations about complex things like the brain without knowing specifically what they are talking about. Hemispheres have basic redundancies built into their structures. That's just not the same thing as removing key structures entirely, from both hemispheres.
Over the past few years, I've steadily built up respect and mod-points to the point where I have a +1 comment bonus. Well, it was all for this one moment: so that I could say something that needs to be said, and yet still have my account and maybe even my +1 bonus survive the consequences....
While Schiavo in particular was indeed gorked beyond ungorking, its a little misleading to show laypeople that scan and claim that it dramatically demonstrates the point. There are actually people walking around today with CT scans that are similarly horrifying in the huge spaces. There are people making do okay with some very abnormal brains. The difference with Schiavo is that the spaces were caused by particular sorts of massive brain inujries and the complete atrophy of particular areas of the brain. But you can't tell that directly from a CT, especially as a layperson. For all a layperson knows, the critical areas could simply be moved around and squished but still functioning to some degree. In Schiavo they were not, but a layperson just can't tell so dramatically as looking at one CT.
It's also important to remember that the brain is not ALL just undifferentiated mush, but has all sort of specialized areas that cannot be replaced by other specialized areas. The guy in this article has damage to some of those areas, and more importantly ther breaking of important connections BETWEEN areas, but not a total loss of any area: they still had functioning sections that rewired and worked overtime to compensate. However, if both of your hippocampi die, it's not like your amygdala is suddenly going to switch over and start performing their functions.
This case has been paraded around because of the Schiavo case, but in doing so its only illuminated how medically ignorant some people are: they don't care about the specifics, or learning about how the brain works, and they lump together uncertainties about one area of knowledge about the brain (its ability to create new connections to repair damage, which contrary to the sort of hyperbolic claims of the article, we've always known is pretty plastic and this is just an extreme example) and try to pretend that raise questions about a completely different area of knowledge: all without acknowledging that there are any key differences or even thinking about them.
"You're using words that *must* have different meanings than I understand them to mean. "
Why MUST they? Because Greek-speaking authors MUST know the Hebrew Scriptures better than the Jews because you MUST be right at any costs?
YOU are the one who boldly declared that Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies in Scripture. You forgot to add "IF you squint really hard, hold the Bible at just the right angle, substitute some letters here, and DON'T read the text litterally and interpret it the way I do." If suddenly seeing things your way requires days and days of special definition and examination, then why did you make such a bold and unamibguous claim to begin with? It seems like you are trying to have your cake and eat it to.
""It's true that one of the words can be interpreted to mean "young woman." It also can be interpreted to mean "virgin.""
This is what fortune tellers do: they try to weasel around ambiguous things by claiming a very specific interpretation matches a very specific event, when in fact if the event was different, they'd use a different interpretation.
And no: it's Christian apologists who NEED the text to be interpreted to mean virgin. But all the text SAYS is young woman. If you want to imagine that young women tend to be virgins, that's your imperative, but then claiming that this is a specific prophecy that Jesus fulfilled becomes an incredibly weak argument.
And again, you are forgetting that the only people impressed or interested in virgin births were pagans. It was never something that the Hebrew God had shown interest in and utterly irrelevant to the purpose of the messiah.
"It's true that the prophecy was about Hezekiah, but the majority position is that the prophecy addresses both the birth of Hezekiah *and* is a messianic prophecy."
By "majority position" you apparently mean "Christians, who make up the majority, desperately need it to mean that, so they believe that." But where in the TEXT are you finding this? Remember that a prophecy is only meaningful if you can find it specifically in the text in a way that is clear PRIOR to the event being specified. Otherwise, you're just playing a game of match-up that you could play with ANY text at all. I could find hundreds of vague prophecies about JFK's assasination in The Lord of the Rings if I played the same game with the same sloppy standards.
The plain fact of the matter is that Scriptures are far better understood by the Jews, in part because they have documents and writings and scholarship far larger than just the Scriptures themselves that are equally important to understanding what they say. Christians simply ignored all of those and pretended like the OT books were the only documents that mattered. Who the messiah is something that is very clear and unambiguous, and Christ simply failed outright to fulfill any of it. The entire doctrine of the Second Coming (and the early expectation that it would be very very soon after his death... and then that it would be exactly 1000 years after his death... and so on) is part of trying to deal with this huge flaw in the claim that he was the messiah.
If you really need days and days of special definitions and explanations to refute all that, then okay. But doesn't that seriously call into question your bombast for declaring that it's clear at all that Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecy? If he did, he did. We shouldn't have to convene month-long examinations to determine it.
"You cannot name one place on this planet that does NOT show evidence that it was under water at some time. "
Look, you made this claim: YOU back it up. It's ridiculous to ask me to go chasing down every claim you make just because you can toss off a bunch of stuff really fast. As I noted, the point is irrelevant regardless, since a global requires that every place be under water at the SAME TIME, which clearly is not the case.
"This coupled with evidence that there are many oceans worth of water locked up in the mantle, tends to corroborate that such a flood could have indeed have taken place."
No, it doesn't. Do you have any clue how evidence and argument work? Show that it did happen, and disprove all the evidence that it didn't happen. If there was a global flood of such a magnitude as you claim, all sorts of things would have to be true of the geological record. But they aren't. You need to explain that, not just fantasize about how microscropic water molecules embedded in the mantle could be poeticaly imagined to be oceans.
This is what I don't get about creationists. They want to pretend they are doing science, and they dream up all sorts of claims about how the flood could have happened that seem to them plausible, but then they don't ever sit down and think, like a scientist would, about testing their theories, or about what they would imply or require that we should think about. For instance, if there were oceans under the earth that welled up at one point, there would be necessarily be ample evidence of this event, because it would radically alter the earth's crust in well known ways. Yet none of this is found anywhere. Furthermore, all the physical implications of such an event are simply ignored. If a body of water that deep welled up, it would come out as superheated steam, and as with the laughable water vapor theory, that much water falling would have litterally poached the earth, including Noah.
"There is other evidence of the consistent ancient legends in diverse cultures of eight people surviving a huge flood."
But here's the thing: they aren't consistent. They appear only in cultures that lived next to major rivers and flood plains, and they often tell radically different stories: often without boats at all, much less boats full of every animal on earth. More interestingly though is that the particular boat/ark/animal/god saving type story is prevalent largely only in the ME, and versions of it pre-date the noah story, but feature different characters and Gods. So likely we had a myth based off a local flood in the ME that grew in popularity in the region and was incorporated into early Judiac beliefs.
Of course, worse for the global flood theory is that we have records of civilizations that existed unintterupted by their own total destruction through all the times when the flood was supposedly happening.
If IEDs weren't ALREADY illegal, anyone that suggested the US signing a treaty making them so would no doubt win near unanimous approval almost overnight. I think that more proves my point than undermines it.
Why is it that when apologists start to get hit up for facts, they suddenly get all post-modern and everything starts to be about interepretation and nothing can be resolved? I'm not using any special terms here. Indeed, that's the whole point: it's by being litteral and straightforward that the claims of Christianity being well founded in the Scriptures fall to pieces.
"Exactly wrong, but the opposite is true. In Job 26:7 we read:"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."
Which could mean almost anything, but certianly doesn't contradict the idea, expressed clearly in the Bible, that one can see all lands by getting to the top of a really tall tower. Again, a ridiculous stretch.
"Nobody can "prove" anything, but I can provide some strong evidence."
Were you under the impression that your links did so? Because they didn't. I asked you to back up your assertions, and you compeltely punted. Again: where is your evidence of a global flood? Where is the evidence that the entire world was flooded at the same time. Because there is plenty of evidence that no such thing ever occured.
"No known laws of science PRECLUDE such a scenario."
Aside from there being no evidence of either it ever happening, or any process that could cause such a thing to happen?
"Science can only address what we observe today and how things work now."
This is a common fallacy. Science can address whatever there is _evidence_ for.
"Anything is indeed possible, but some things are highly improbable."
Oh really? But just a little while ago, you were pumping up how the Bible is so deadly accurate. Now you seem to be saying that any claim about anything can be accurate, if you believe it hard enough and invent enough ad hoc explanations. Exactly as I predicted, no less!
As I said: if you think the Japanese or the Chinese cultures have problems still with white people, check out what they both have to say about Koreans. Most of Asia has a long way to go, if not longer, than the far better integrated and multicultural West.
"And there you have it. Of course Jews and Christians disagree about the interpretation of the scriptures. It's all about context, and translation can sometimes be tricky. You can find scholars who say that the Hebrew text meant one thing, and I can find scholars that say it means another. You have to look at the whole package. I have looked at several religious systems, and find Christianity the most compelling world view out there."
It might well be compelling in its own right, but this pomo relatavism of trying to pretend that it's well grounded in the Scriptures just because Christians need it to be so doesn't seem plausible to me. In this discussion, it really looks like there is a clear right position, and it's the Jews. I'm sorry, but if you are an HONEST scholar, then you admit that Isaiah said nothing about any virgin. You admit that there is no "piercing" in the text. It isn't simply a matter of interpretation.
What I find so bizarre is how people will demand strict literalism, then make all sorts of grand claims about thousands of prophecies fulfilled, but then when the plain text doesn't support their claims, out comes the cooing "all viewpoints are equally valid" stuff. Sorry, no dice.
"First, the documentary evidence of the gospels is sufficient to clearly identify the primary followers of Christ."
Nonsense. Though an amusing claim, because the authorship of those Gospels (who in their original texts are not only unnamed, but missing key passages like the Trinity that only show up later) is, guess what: extra-Biblical tradition. The same tradition as things like praying to saints that many people reject because "it's not in the Bible" even though it was part of the early church long before there was any "Bible." "Mark" as the name of the author of that Gospel isn't in the texts either. It's added by traditional belief, not any documentary evidence.
"Of course, I'll also differ with your assertion that Paul is the only NT writer we know for sure by name. And he never met Jesus."
So you disagree with Paul himself? Paul only ever claims that he had a vision of Jesus. That's exactly what I said. Whether you believe that the vision Jesus was a reborn Jesus is irrelevant. Paul' beliefs came from that vision, not any first hand contact with the historical events of the Gospels (which would be written down long after he wrote, and which he seems wholly unaware of or of the major claims that they make about Jesus and his ministry)
"I beg to differ. Christianity was built on the idea that the Hebrew scriptures were foundational to faith and while the first generation of Christians did not have the whole of the New Testament (because it had not yet been completed) as parts of the NT were available, people referred to that as authoritative."
You need to learn a heck of a lot more about the early church. Most of its members were illiterate, to begin with, and ideas were passed orally: having a codified set of documents was a pretty silly until much later: and even then (and now we're talking about the Catholic Church) when the Bible was first put together, no one had the idea that it was meant to be an all encompasing unit unto itself, the only text you needed. Not until the Gutenberg Bible and Martin Luther did anyone start thinking that.
But more key here is that the "Hebrew Scriptures" that are in the OT were never considered whole or sufficient. Heck, the NT quotes passages that AREN'T IN the OT. And of course Jews never thought this way in the first place. The idea of reading the OT and then considering yourself an expert on Scripture is just plain laughable: it was then, and it continues to be today. For a rabbi, that's the sort of lazy thinking that likely got Paul kicked out of Pharisee school.
"The whole divide within Christendom about the sufficiency of scripture alone came as a result of the abuses perpetrated by people who decided that they wanted to extend the reach of the church beyond what Christ intended. Interesting
"It's pretty clear that Jesus was very successful in reaching massive numbers of the Jews in Israel."
Um, no? It never caught on among Jews. That's just a fact. Like I said: not a single major rabbi converted. And very few Jews at all in the end.
"The early and rapid spread of Christianity was first among Jews in various parts of the Roman Empire."
No, the rapid spread was among gentiles, not Jews. The Jewish efforts stagnated and then turned increasingly ati-Semetic very very quickly. Jews very quickly became dangerous and demonized. They understood that Scripture showed that Jesus couldn't possibly be the messiah.
"Many Jews accepted Christianity because Jesus' teachings, when properly understood, are completely orthodox and are the true fulfillment of God's promise to Israel."
I'm just saying that "properly understood" to learned Jews sounded and looked like "if you ignore all these direct contradictions, the fact that it turns everything god has been saying upside down and backwards and don't speak and can't read Hebrew..."
"Original sin is described in the scriptures right from the very beginning, with the story of Adam and Eve."
Well, the Jews wrote and venerated this story. They say that you're completely misreading it. Why shouldn't I believe it, since its them who carried it around for thousands of years of scholarship and learning about it?
"In the story, their disobedience leads to all of mankind living in a condition made imperfect by sin. Regardless of whether the story is meant to describe historical fact, its point is to describe human life as it is. We humans have a (sometimes limited) capability to distinguish between good and evil, and we also have free will. Although we are drawn to God and goodness, we also have a sinful tendency which can separate us from God's perfection."
But the Christian conclusion: that mankind is unsalvageable, is completely foriegn to Judiasm. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and got punished: that's the point of the story. The moral is: obey God: do your best to uphold his commandments. Repent when you do evil. God isn't necessarily going to pull the rug compeltely out from underneath you if you disobey, but God isn't going to brook you doing bad stuff either without consequences.
For the Jews and their Scripture, Jesus is an answer to a question never asked: a salvation not required. It simply isn't in the Jewish tradition that some extra means of salvation is necessary, let alone one that is fundamentally unintelligible. It CERTAINLY isn't in there that an extra-special super-sacrifice is necessary. Sacrifice is one of the most trivial means of forgiveness.
"I think this psalm reinforces everything that I said before. It also addresses the need for forgiveness from God. It shows that the true nature of sacrifice is a penitent heart"
Where does it say anything about the need for a paganistic human sacrifice (something God repeatedly condemns as the practice of the pagans?) in order to complete some extra-special secret hidden bonus round of the Torah? Where does it say anything other than the very plain system of sin and repetance and cleansing of sin: a process long outlined and understood? Where in all the Scriptures is there the claim that God demands belief in some clutch of miracles for salvation, as opposed to things like repentance and obeying God's laws? Scripture explicitly warns AGAINST those that claim miracles and magic events to prove their teachings.
Look: I'm not really trying to convince you. But I urge you to look more into Judiasm and at least get an appreciation as to why, for the Jews, the claims of Christians seem glib, lazy, and barely even scratch the surface of understanding what the Scriptures really say. The central message of Christianity may or may not be true, but all the elaborate claims trying to tie it into Judiasm are by far its weakest points.
Race has some descriptive power as far as genetic history goes, sure, and some medical differences, though it's still not known how much is cultural and how much is genetic (for instance, the higher incidence of heart disease and diabetes in African Americans). Though the racial categories generally used really ARE often very poorly matched to reality. "black" aboriginals are genetically closer to white people than they are to "black" Africans, for instance.
But there is no huge problem with cross-racial transplants that I know of. My aunt has a pancreas from an African American and a kidney from an Latino. Matching blood chemistry is far far more important that anything else, and not even siblings necessarily match.
"The original word translated "corners" comes from a navigational term meaning quadrants, as the earth is still divided by navigators."
Sorry, no dice. Using a concept from millenia after the text in question was written doesn't work. As with all other cultures at the time, the authors of scriptures thought the world was flat and had real ends. That's why a character in the OT can stand on a tall tower and see all the lands of the earth at once (note: not possible on a globe)
"You name just one continent that was NOT covered by water at some time in the past."
This is not only a red herring, but now you've changed what you asked. You originally claimed that EVERY place on earth was under water at some point. Even if that claim wasn't itself irrelevant to proving a global flood, that's not the same thing as asking about parts of contintents. I asked YOU to prove your claim. Can you do it? Or did you just make it up out of some tract you read? Have you actually studied geology at ALL?
"The Bible states in its opening sentence that time, space, matter-energy were all brought into existence out of nothing by God."
It doesn't state any such thing, and no such concepts even existed when the text was written. Only trying to read things into it after the fact gets you there. Of course, the Genesis story is just the latest in a whole bunch of related stories that predated it. Originally, it was told about seven generations of gods, not seven days, and the construction of a creature known as Adamah: the man of red dirt who would allow the seventh generation of gods to rest and not be tired unto death by their efforts. Sound slightly familiar?
"God further repeatedly stated after each creation step, that it was "very good". God had made a perfect world, where there was no entropy, decay, death, deterioration, including two perfect humans. Their rebellion against God through unbelief destroyed the then perfect creation. God made some fundamental changes to the laws of physics at that time in order to confine the effects of man's rebellion."
Oh, now that's convienient. You've basically retreated into a variant of "last Thursdayism" i.e. the idea that all existence started last Thursady, complete with memories. In other words, its a completely ad hoc belief at allows you can explain away ANYTHING at all... and yet also, you are unable to predict or explain anything yourself because the belief has no boundaries and specifies nothing in particular. Meaning that all claims to the Bible "predicting" anything at all become moot. No matter what the evidence is, you could always claim that it matches the Bible, because you can make up just about anything at all.
"All science is based on observing through our senses of what exists now, since that fundamental discontinuity. Man has was created perfect and has been DEVOLVING ever since."
So you claim. Unfortunately, the evidence clearly shows that the Earth is billions of years old, sorry. If your only way out is to claim that anything is possible in order to save your beliefs, then you've basically given up. I could use the same silly line to justify any claim as well.
Your point is simply silly then. There is no such requirement. Biology is too complex to have any simple "I can only understand simple concepts, whaaaa!" principles. Try reading a bio-chem textbook someday. What you'll find is not a lack of math, but rather an insane amount of math, most of it only simplified approximations for beginners.
"Seems to me that biochemistry (DNA) and cellular biology are fundemental and unitary."
Not in the slightest. They are immensely complicated to learn. There is no G= x/v for how cellular transport membranes work. You have to instead understand the interplay of hordes of different protein shapes and more to even get a basic grasp of what's going on.
"Biology stands alone among the major sciences for its empiricism and lack of rigor."
Lol, whatever. You just sound like a bitter dude who flunked biochem.
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I agree: it's a perfectly fair point: even if everyone was an non-believer, we'd still have assholes. Jesus may not have been the Son of any God, but he was definately right when he said that "And the assholes, you will always have with you." Or else that's what he SHOULD have said. :)
Of course, the Jews have quite a bit to say about the idea of their scriptures meaningfully being anyone's "Old Testament."
However, while we're noting times in the NT, the writings of Paul are probably the earliest of all, and the only documents that we are sure were, mostly, written by a particular known person.
He's correcting me, because just like PC freaks, he spends his time running around whining about penises based on his obsession against a particular political movement. I used "laypeople" without any special thought to the matter. The only busbody is him.
You're the one going out of your way to correct me. Whose being the enforcer of political correctness now?
"When I have attempted to defend my point of view, you have refuted with broad assertions that I am obviously wrong. "
I've made arguments, with points to back them up. Did you really expect me to argue the opposite of the conclusions I've come to and the against my own arguments? Insetad of responding with your own arguments and conclusions, you have responded by increasingly trying to focus less on those arguments than on characterizing me and whatever you interpret as my tone or my attitude.
The problem is that anyone can make these sorts of character assertions, all to no purpose. Fine, claim that I have made broad assertions that you are obviously wrong. So what? The http://timecube.com/ guy can do the same. All of it is offtopic.
"For you to scornfully claim that it's obvious that Christian scholars are wrong is... rather uncharitable to say the least."
If I am uncharitable to that view, it is because I think that view is very wrongly given special respect based largely on status and power rather than on soundness. This isn't some view I've pulled out of the blue: it's something I conclude based on conduct and examination of those arguments.
Whether the text says virgin or not isn't some matter of opinion. It doesn't say virgin. For hundreds of years, no one THOUGHT it even implied virgin. For an unknown author of a tiny religious sect who may or may not have even known Hebrew to suddenly act like it both said virgin and was an unknown prophecy is, sorry, a little ridiculous and a terribly methodology for claiming that a prophecy has been fulfilled (particularly when, like the calling of Jesus Emmanuel in the text yet nowhere else, the gospel is the only primary source making the claim in the first place)
"Either you cannot or will not consider opinions other than yours. Your tone and word choice are well described by your word - arrogance. Your attitude is speaking so loudly that I cannot hear your intellect at all. I sincerely doubt that you are interested in hearing mine."
Again, you are alleging closemindedness and arrogance, but such allegations are really little different than slinging insults.
"Is it possible that your point of view is less than perfect?"
Of course. This is just another implied insult on your part instead of an argument.
"What evidence would be sufficient to demonstrate to you that Jesus is the Messiah? Is there any evidence that would be sufficient?"
Certainly. If it could be shown that Jesus: returned all the Jews to Israel. Redeemed Israel politically. Brought about world peace (instead of a sword), and brought all peoples to acknowledge God. That is what "the messiah" is, laid out very clearly (just like the law is repeatedly said to be eternal, not something that gets tossed out at some point in history because Paul has a dream about lobsters and Jesus is disdainful of the law).
All of this stuff about the messiah being born of a virgin, riding on two asses (because the author of the gospel didn't understand Scriptural poetic idiom and thought "an ass, foal of an ass" meant two animals), being the son of god: all of that was made up after the fact and is simply not part of the concept of the messiah as described by the prophets and outlined in greater detail in countless subsidiary traditions and documents.
Again: am I saying that any of this means that Jesus wasn't a great guy, or couldn't have been the son of god sent to save all humanity for its sins? No. The entire Torah tradition could be completely bunk, and Jesus the true hotness. But the idea that Jesus is the Jewish messiah consistent with the Torah simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny. And before you run off calling me arrogant again, yes: that is the argument that I am making.
I shot an insult, because in the end, that's the only thing that serves any purpose. Just as with the evolution debate, there comes a time when you realize that certain viewpoints have made themselves completely immune to any reasoned argument and you will only be wasting your time if you engage them.
Now, I happen to love reasoned argument. But if by some quirk of cosmic chance you happen to be a reasonable Schiavo groupie, then you can blame your irrational raving fellows for ruining any hope I might have that there is any point in having a discussion on this issue with someone that makes the same vile accusations and lousy arguments, or thinks that quacks and Senators watching videotapes is the same thing as "medical experts" or are innocent and without their own agendas or biases.
Then he should know better, end of story. If he's an expert on the retina, that's great, but it hardly makes him an expert in reading and interpreting CT scans. I stand by my point: a single CT scan like that should not be presented to laypeople as a highly dramatic proof that Schaivo was beyond recovery. It gives people a sense of knowledge that is essentially false or unwarranted when in fact the issue is much more complicated and reading CT scans not so simple.
Oh, and more importantly, we're generally there talking about very young developing brains. Early on, the brain is far more plastic and undifferntiated: like a poetic jell-o mold that hasn't set yet, it hasn't taken a shape that can be destroyed. But that doesn't last in adulthood. It's also worth noting that the structures being removed in these cases are, in fact the most undifferntiated and general purpose parts of the brain (the ones dealing with overall higher consciousness): not the specific structures I was talking about. A lot of people seem to think that hemimegalencephaly involves removing half the brain, but that's not really the case at all.
"If we took the time to talk about physics, red light, wavelengths and the expanding universe, it could become plain that red is sometimes red-shifted to another color. In order to really determine that we each understand the others' position, we'd need to lay the foundation."
Are you really claiming that the proof that Jesus is the messiah is this absurdly obscure? Doesn't that undermine your own claims about Jesus fulfilling all these prophecies if deciding so requires some very strained and particular interpretations of the text, after the fact?
"Just because you assert that "the scriptures are far better understood by the Jews" doesn't mean that they really understood what they claimed (or claim) to know."
Maybe, maybe not. But I should think that the presumption that scholars who actually read and spoke Hebrew should be prima facie more trusted than people who don't, and who demonstrably mistranslated the text in order to try and justify an ideological movement. That's not conclusive, but it's a point worth making as we look at the specific examples in order to understand who is saying what and why.
"but obviously it is pointless to have a reasonable conversation with you because apparently you already know everything."
What were you saying about ad hominem? I've made arguments. You can't refute them. So, predictably, you declare me arrogant or whatever to beg off.
Again, this is the problem when people use grand generalizations about complex things like the brain without knowing specifically what they are talking about. Hemispheres have basic redundancies built into their structures. That's just not the same thing as removing key structures entirely, from both hemispheres.
Over the past few years, I've steadily built up respect and mod-points to the point where I have a +1 comment bonus. Well, it was all for this one moment: so that I could say something that needs to be said, and yet still have my account and maybe even my +1 bonus survive the consequences. ...
You, sir, or madam, are embarrasingly stupid.
While Schiavo in particular was indeed gorked beyond ungorking, its a little misleading to show laypeople that scan and claim that it dramatically demonstrates the point. There are actually people walking around today with CT scans that are similarly horrifying in the huge spaces. There are people making do okay with some very abnormal brains. The difference with Schiavo is that the spaces were caused by particular sorts of massive brain inujries and the complete atrophy of particular areas of the brain. But you can't tell that directly from a CT, especially as a layperson. For all a layperson knows, the critical areas could simply be moved around and squished but still functioning to some degree. In Schiavo they were not, but a layperson just can't tell so dramatically as looking at one CT.
It's also important to remember that the brain is not ALL just undifferentiated mush, but has all sort of specialized areas that cannot be replaced by other specialized areas. The guy in this article has damage to some of those areas, and more importantly ther breaking of important connections BETWEEN areas, but not a total loss of any area: they still had functioning sections that rewired and worked overtime to compensate. However, if both of your hippocampi die, it's not like your amygdala is suddenly going to switch over and start performing their functions.
This case has been paraded around because of the Schiavo case, but in doing so its only illuminated how medically ignorant some people are: they don't care about the specifics, or learning about how the brain works, and they lump together uncertainties about one area of knowledge about the brain (its ability to create new connections to repair damage, which contrary to the sort of hyperbolic claims of the article, we've always known is pretty plastic and this is just an extreme example) and try to pretend that raise questions about a completely different area of knowledge: all without acknowledging that there are any key differences or even thinking about them.
"You're using words that *must* have different meanings than I understand them to mean. "
Why MUST they? Because Greek-speaking authors MUST know the Hebrew Scriptures better than the Jews because you MUST be right at any costs?
YOU are the one who boldly declared that Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies in Scripture. You forgot to add "IF you squint really hard, hold the Bible at just the right angle, substitute some letters here, and DON'T read the text litterally and interpret it the way I do." If suddenly seeing things your way requires days and days of special definition and examination, then why did you make such a bold and unamibguous claim to begin with? It seems like you are trying to have your cake and eat it to.
""It's true that one of the words can be interpreted to mean "young woman." It also can be interpreted to mean "virgin.""
This is what fortune tellers do: they try to weasel around ambiguous things by claiming a very specific interpretation matches a very specific event, when in fact if the event was different, they'd use a different interpretation.
And no: it's Christian apologists who NEED the text to be interpreted to mean virgin. But all the text SAYS is young woman. If you want to imagine that young women tend to be virgins, that's your imperative, but then claiming that this is a specific prophecy that Jesus fulfilled becomes an incredibly weak argument.
And again, you are forgetting that the only people impressed or interested in virgin births were pagans. It was never something that the Hebrew God had shown interest in and utterly irrelevant to the purpose of the messiah.
"It's true that the prophecy was about Hezekiah, but the majority position is that the prophecy addresses both the birth of Hezekiah *and* is a messianic prophecy."
By "majority position" you apparently mean "Christians, who make up the majority, desperately need it to mean that, so they believe that." But where in the TEXT are you finding this? Remember that a prophecy is only meaningful if you can find it specifically in the text in a way that is clear PRIOR to the event being specified. Otherwise, you're just playing a game of match-up that you could play with ANY text at all. I could find hundreds of vague prophecies about JFK's assasination in The Lord of the Rings if I played the same game with the same sloppy standards.
The plain fact of the matter is that Scriptures are far better understood by the Jews, in part because they have documents and writings and scholarship far larger than just the Scriptures themselves that are equally important to understanding what they say. Christians simply ignored all of those and pretended like the OT books were the only documents that mattered. Who the messiah is something that is very clear and unambiguous, and Christ simply failed outright to fulfill any of it. The entire doctrine of the Second Coming (and the early expectation that it would be very very soon after his death... and then that it would be exactly 1000 years after his death... and so on) is part of trying to deal with this huge flaw in the claim that he was the messiah.
If you really need days and days of special definitions and explanations to refute all that, then okay. But doesn't that seriously call into question your bombast for declaring that it's clear at all that Jesus fulfilled the messianic prophecy? If he did, he did. We shouldn't have to convene month-long examinations to determine it.
"You cannot name one place on this planet that does NOT show evidence that it was under water at some time. "
Look, you made this claim: YOU back it up. It's ridiculous to ask me to go chasing down every claim you make just because you can toss off a bunch of stuff really fast. As I noted, the point is irrelevant regardless, since a global requires that every place be under water at the SAME TIME, which clearly is not the case.
"This coupled with evidence that there are many oceans worth of water locked up in the mantle, tends to corroborate that such a flood could have indeed have taken place."
No, it doesn't. Do you have any clue how evidence and argument work? Show that it did happen, and disprove all the evidence that it didn't happen. If there was a global flood of such a magnitude as you claim, all sorts of things would have to be true of the geological record. But they aren't. You need to explain that, not just fantasize about how microscropic water molecules embedded in the mantle could be poeticaly imagined to be oceans.
This is what I don't get about creationists. They want to pretend they are doing science, and they dream up all sorts of claims about how the flood could have happened that seem to them plausible, but then they don't ever sit down and think, like a scientist would, about testing their theories, or about what they would imply or require that we should think about. For instance, if there were oceans under the earth that welled up at one point, there would be necessarily be ample evidence of this event, because it would radically alter the earth's crust in well known ways. Yet none of this is found anywhere. Furthermore, all the physical implications of such an event are simply ignored. If a body of water that deep welled up, it would come out as superheated steam, and as with the laughable water vapor theory, that much water falling would have litterally poached the earth, including Noah.
"There is other evidence of the consistent ancient legends in diverse cultures of eight people surviving a huge flood."
But here's the thing: they aren't consistent. They appear only in cultures that lived next to major rivers and flood plains, and they often tell radically different stories: often without boats at all, much less boats full of every animal on earth. More interestingly though is that the particular boat/ark/animal/god saving type story is prevalent largely only in the ME, and versions of it pre-date the noah story, but feature different characters and Gods. So likely we had a myth based off a local flood in the ME that grew in popularity in the region and was incorporated into early Judiac beliefs.
Of course, worse for the global flood theory is that we have records of civilizations that existed unintterupted by their own total destruction through all the times when the flood was supposedly happening.
If IEDs weren't ALREADY illegal, anyone that suggested the US signing a treaty making them so would no doubt win near unanimous approval almost overnight. I think that more proves my point than undermines it.
Why is it that when apologists start to get hit up for facts, they suddenly get all post-modern and everything starts to be about interepretation and nothing can be resolved? I'm not using any special terms here. Indeed, that's the whole point: it's by being litteral and straightforward that the claims of Christianity being well founded in the Scriptures fall to pieces.
Have it your way, though.
"Exactly wrong, but the opposite is true. In Job 26:7 we read:"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing."
Which could mean almost anything, but certianly doesn't contradict the idea, expressed clearly in the Bible, that one can see all lands by getting to the top of a really tall tower. Again, a ridiculous stretch.
"Nobody can "prove" anything, but I can provide some strong evidence."
Were you under the impression that your links did so? Because they didn't. I asked you to back up your assertions, and you compeltely punted. Again: where is your evidence of a global flood? Where is the evidence that the entire world was flooded at the same time. Because there is plenty of evidence that no such thing ever occured.
"No known laws of science PRECLUDE such a scenario."
Aside from there being no evidence of either it ever happening, or any process that could cause such a thing to happen?
"Science can only address what we observe today and how things work now."
This is a common fallacy. Science can address whatever there is _evidence_ for.
"Anything is indeed possible, but some things are highly improbable."
Oh really? But just a little while ago, you were pumping up how the Bible is so deadly accurate. Now you seem to be saying that any claim about anything can be accurate, if you believe it hard enough and invent enough ad hoc explanations. Exactly as I predicted, no less!
Only if you'll repeat it over and over like a cult mantra... about sixteen more times. That'll do it.
Here's the pretty obvious answer as to why America doesn't care about landmines:= mines%20UN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRF7dTafPu0&search
Because it only happens to worthless swarthy foriegn kids, and not your precious, precious babies.
As I said: if you think the Japanese or the Chinese cultures have problems still with white people, check out what they both have to say about Koreans. Most of Asia has a long way to go, if not longer, than the far better integrated and multicultural West.
"And there you have it. Of course Jews and Christians disagree about the interpretation of the scriptures. It's all about context, and translation can sometimes be tricky. You can find scholars who say that the Hebrew text meant one thing, and I can find scholars that say it means another. You have to look at the whole package. I have looked at several religious systems, and find Christianity the most compelling world view out there."
It might well be compelling in its own right, but this pomo relatavism of trying to pretend that it's well grounded in the Scriptures just because Christians need it to be so doesn't seem plausible to me. In this discussion, it really looks like there is a clear right position, and it's the Jews. I'm sorry, but if you are an HONEST scholar, then you admit that Isaiah said nothing about any virgin. You admit that there is no "piercing" in the text. It isn't simply a matter of interpretation.
What I find so bizarre is how people will demand strict literalism, then make all sorts of grand claims about thousands of prophecies fulfilled, but then when the plain text doesn't support their claims, out comes the cooing "all viewpoints are equally valid" stuff. Sorry, no dice.
"First, the documentary evidence of the gospels is sufficient to clearly identify the primary followers of Christ."
Nonsense. Though an amusing claim, because the authorship of those Gospels (who in their original texts are not only unnamed, but missing key passages like the Trinity that only show up later) is, guess what: extra-Biblical tradition. The same tradition as things like praying to saints that many people reject because "it's not in the Bible" even though it was part of the early church long before there was any "Bible." "Mark" as the name of the author of that Gospel isn't in the texts either. It's added by traditional belief, not any documentary evidence.
"Of course, I'll also differ with your assertion that Paul is the only NT writer we know for sure by name. And he never met Jesus."
So you disagree with Paul himself? Paul only ever claims that he had a vision of Jesus. That's exactly what I said. Whether you believe that the vision Jesus was a reborn Jesus is irrelevant. Paul' beliefs came from that vision, not any first hand contact with the historical events of the Gospels (which would be written down long after he wrote, and which he seems wholly unaware of or of the major claims that they make about Jesus and his ministry)
"I beg to differ. Christianity was built on the idea that the Hebrew scriptures were foundational to faith and while the first generation of Christians did not have the whole of the New Testament (because it had not yet been completed) as parts of the NT were available, people referred to that as authoritative."
You need to learn a heck of a lot more about the early church. Most of its members were illiterate, to begin with, and ideas were passed orally: having a codified set of documents was a pretty silly until much later: and even then (and now we're talking about the Catholic Church) when the Bible was first put together, no one had the idea that it was meant to be an all encompasing unit unto itself, the only text you needed. Not until the Gutenberg Bible and Martin Luther did anyone start thinking that.
But more key here is that the "Hebrew Scriptures" that are in the OT were never considered whole or sufficient. Heck, the NT quotes passages that AREN'T IN the OT. And of course Jews never thought this way in the first place. The idea of reading the OT and then considering yourself an expert on Scripture is just plain laughable: it was then, and it continues to be today. For a rabbi, that's the sort of lazy thinking that likely got Paul kicked out of Pharisee school.
"The whole divide within Christendom about the sufficiency of scripture alone came as a result of the abuses perpetrated by people who decided that they wanted to extend the reach of the church beyond what Christ intended. Interesting
"It's pretty clear that Jesus was very successful in reaching massive numbers of the Jews in Israel."
Um, no? It never caught on among Jews. That's just a fact. Like I said: not a single major rabbi converted. And very few Jews at all in the end.
"The early and rapid spread of Christianity was first among Jews in various parts of the Roman Empire."
No, the rapid spread was among gentiles, not Jews. The Jewish efforts stagnated and then turned increasingly ati-Semetic very very quickly. Jews very quickly became dangerous and demonized. They understood that Scripture showed that Jesus couldn't possibly be the messiah.
"Many Jews accepted Christianity because Jesus' teachings, when properly understood, are completely orthodox and are the true fulfillment of God's promise to Israel."
I'm just saying that "properly understood" to learned Jews sounded and looked like "if you ignore all these direct contradictions, the fact that it turns everything god has been saying upside down and backwards and don't speak and can't read Hebrew..."
"Original sin is described in the scriptures right from the very beginning, with the story of Adam and Eve."
Well, the Jews wrote and venerated this story. They say that you're completely misreading it. Why shouldn't I believe it, since its them who carried it around for thousands of years of scholarship and learning about it?
"In the story, their disobedience leads to all of mankind living in a condition made imperfect by sin. Regardless of whether the story is meant to describe historical fact, its point is to describe human life as it is. We humans have a (sometimes limited) capability to distinguish between good and evil, and we also have free will. Although we are drawn to God and goodness, we also have a sinful tendency which can separate us from God's perfection."
But the Christian conclusion: that mankind is unsalvageable, is completely foriegn to Judiasm. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and got punished: that's the point of the story. The moral is: obey God: do your best to uphold his commandments. Repent when you do evil. God isn't necessarily going to pull the rug compeltely out from underneath you if you disobey, but God isn't going to brook you doing bad stuff either without consequences.
For the Jews and their Scripture, Jesus is an answer to a question never asked: a salvation not required. It simply isn't in the Jewish tradition that some extra means of salvation is necessary, let alone one that is fundamentally unintelligible. It CERTAINLY isn't in there that an extra-special super-sacrifice is necessary. Sacrifice is one of the most trivial means of forgiveness.
"I think this psalm reinforces everything that I said before. It also addresses the need for forgiveness from God. It shows that the true nature of sacrifice is a penitent heart"
Where does it say anything about the need for a paganistic human sacrifice (something God repeatedly condemns as the practice of the pagans?) in order to complete some extra-special secret hidden bonus round of the Torah? Where does it say anything other than the very plain system of sin and repetance and cleansing of sin: a process long outlined and understood? Where in all the Scriptures is there the claim that God demands belief in some clutch of miracles for salvation, as opposed to things like repentance and obeying God's laws? Scripture explicitly warns AGAINST those that claim miracles and magic events to prove their teachings.
Look: I'm not really trying to convince you. But I urge you to look more into Judiasm and at least get an appreciation as to why, for the Jews, the claims of Christians seem glib, lazy, and barely even scratch the surface of understanding what the Scriptures really say. The central message of Christianity may or may not be true, but all the elaborate claims trying to tie it into Judiasm are by far its weakest points.
Race has some descriptive power as far as genetic history goes, sure, and some medical differences, though it's still not known how much is cultural and how much is genetic (for instance, the higher incidence of heart disease and diabetes in African Americans). Though the racial categories generally used really ARE often very poorly matched to reality. "black" aboriginals are genetically closer to white people than they are to "black" Africans, for instance.
But there is no huge problem with cross-racial transplants that I know of. My aunt has a pancreas from an African American and a kidney from an Latino. Matching blood chemistry is far far more important that anything else, and not even siblings necessarily match.
"The original word translated "corners" comes from a navigational term meaning quadrants, as the earth is still divided by navigators."
Sorry, no dice. Using a concept from millenia after the text in question was written doesn't work. As with all other cultures at the time, the authors of scriptures thought the world was flat and had real ends. That's why a character in the OT can stand on a tall tower and see all the lands of the earth at once (note: not possible on a globe)
"You name just one continent that was NOT covered by water at some time in the past."
This is not only a red herring, but now you've changed what you asked. You originally claimed that EVERY place on earth was under water at some point. Even if that claim wasn't itself irrelevant to proving a global flood, that's not the same thing as asking about parts of contintents. I asked YOU to prove your claim. Can you do it? Or did you just make it up out of some tract you read? Have you actually studied geology at ALL?
"The Bible states in its opening sentence that time, space, matter-energy were all brought into existence out of nothing by God."
It doesn't state any such thing, and no such concepts even existed when the text was written. Only trying to read things into it after the fact gets you there. Of course, the Genesis story is just the latest in a whole bunch of related stories that predated it. Originally, it was told about seven generations of gods, not seven days, and the construction of a creature known as Adamah: the man of red dirt who would allow the seventh generation of gods to rest and not be tired unto death by their efforts. Sound slightly familiar?
"God further repeatedly stated after each creation step, that it was "very good". God had made a perfect world, where there was no entropy, decay, death, deterioration, including two perfect humans. Their rebellion against God through unbelief destroyed the then perfect creation. God made some fundamental changes to the laws of physics at that time in order to confine the effects of man's rebellion."
Oh, now that's convienient. You've basically retreated into a variant of "last Thursdayism" i.e. the idea that all existence started last Thursady, complete with memories. In other words, its a completely ad hoc belief at allows you can explain away ANYTHING at all... and yet also, you are unable to predict or explain anything yourself because the belief has no boundaries and specifies nothing in particular. Meaning that all claims to the Bible "predicting" anything at all become moot. No matter what the evidence is, you could always claim that it matches the Bible, because you can make up just about anything at all.
"All science is based on observing through our senses of what exists now, since that fundamental discontinuity. Man has was created perfect and has been DEVOLVING ever since."
So you claim. Unfortunately, the evidence clearly shows that the Earth is billions of years old, sorry. If your only way out is to claim that anything is possible in order to save your beliefs, then you've basically given up. I could use the same silly line to justify any claim as well.
Your point is simply silly then. There is no such requirement. Biology is too complex to have any simple "I can only understand simple concepts, whaaaa!" principles. Try reading a bio-chem textbook someday. What you'll find is not a lack of math, but rather an insane amount of math, most of it only simplified approximations for beginners.
"Seems to me that biochemistry (DNA) and cellular biology are fundemental and unitary."
Not in the slightest. They are immensely complicated to learn. There is no G= x/v for how cellular transport membranes work. You have to instead understand the interplay of hordes of different protein shapes and more to even get a basic grasp of what's going on.
"Biology stands alone among the major sciences for its empiricism and lack of rigor."
Lol, whatever. You just sound like a bitter dude who flunked biochem.