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To: OneVike
The Bible breaks several ways and faith is one thing, but you also have to consider what you could hope to defend in any sort of a formal debate based on evidence.

There are parts of the Bible which I could not hope to defend in a debate; there are other parts such as the flood story and the story of Uzzah in which you have to separate the story itself from the religious language and interpretation i.e. I could defend the story of Uzzah electrocuting himself by putting his hand on something which amounted to a crude capacitor but I could not defend the idea of God killing the guy for saving his (God's) own device from falling off a wagon and breaking; and there are stories I could defend quite well and surprisingly this includes the three major ghost stories in the bible, Jesus' own Resurrection, the tale of Lazarus, and the story of Saul, Samuel, and the "witch of Endor". Those three stories are all entirely ballpark for the paradigm which Julian Jaynes described. I don't subscribe to the idea that such things were shared hallucinations, I believe the phenomena Jaynes wrote about are the way the spirit world works.

Amongst the things I could not hope to defend in a serious debate, the worst is the book of revelations. The thing starts off saying "these things shall shortly come to pass"; there is no rational definition of "shortly" which means that two thousand years later whatever it is still hasn't happened, and reasonable people are standing around saying "Any day now, any day now!!!"

The book of revelations apparently was included in the Bible by some sort of a 5/4 vote and in my estimation the five guys got it wrong and the thing should be removed.

77 posted on 12/09/2011 11:03:22 AM PST by varmintman
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To: varmintman

You’re not a believer.

You are lost eternally if this post is really how you see things.


78 posted on 12/09/2011 11:17:23 AM PST by editor-surveyor (No Federal Sales Tax - No Way!)
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