Dan,

1. OT writers:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_tora1.htm

2. Dead Scrolls 4Q252 Column 2 contains a rewrite of Genesis. It explains why Canaan and not Ham was cursed by Noah (by God).

I have read the Bible as written and in context with its history.
You should do a little research, before criticise people.



O.

Trav,

The Bible is all the things you say. It is typically well and cleverly written, even given its contradictions. It is also a “selected” works. The greater corpus of disparate writings, give the Bible its true historical context. Luckly, some of these other works survived, despite attempts by Christians to eliminate any record of them in the four century. Yes, context is very important.

When runner believes in a literal Bible, he is likely to stand with the greater number of Christians, in history, who believed after 325 CE. Contemporary Christians are the minority in believing many stories are allegorical. Newton didn’t: Trying to rationalise new facts with beliefs disturbed him. If I recall correctly, Newton suggested that celestial mechanics may have been different 6,000 years, to reconcile. The difference between earlier Christians and modern Christians is latter have learned play doge ball.

Context is, about how religions behave generically, Jewish calendars and their relation to the End Times, Julius Caesar elevating the Herodians, when some Jewish sects expected a Messiah from the House of David, Hadrian expelling the Jews from the Holy Lands (meaning they needed a Latin leader to go back in!) and the institutionalisation of Jesus missions between 250 CE – 325 CE and beyond. Raw history.

On a quality TV documentary I saw, it mentioned an early mendicant (not Jesus) who could draw a circle in the soil and it would rain on that spot. Is that so different to “walking on water”, when one realises “in context” that these sort of stories were associated with faith healers of the period?

Your context says German, Italian and French are languages (myths), but your native English (Christianity) is different/special. A linguist can categorise all to be languages, as languages. The latter is true context.

Dear One Under God,

The pademelon did not arise out of thin air. It descended from other creatures as we humans do. Of course there were ancestral forms of the pademelon prior to 10 million years ago. However, pademelons first appeared then according to the fossil evidence.

The scientist dealt with the topic of pademelons. The ancestors of the pademelons would be another topic. Somebody else possibly studied that.

You wrote 'OH DAVID/..beloved of god' and 'love ya bro'. To me love is a very personal feeling. I know another person and grow to love that person. We are close and share things. We know each other's likes and dislikes. We care for each other and express our love in many ways.

I don't believe I am beloved of God since an entity that doesn't exist cannot love me. When you write 'love ya bro' you mean something other than what I mean when I use the word, love. In such a casual use of the word, love, you make it trivial and meaningless. When you write 'love ya bro' it really is an insult. We are just exchanging words on an internet list. To me love is much more than that. I am not your bro. I am an only child and wish I had a real brother. I don't appreciate a phony 'bro'.

"One does not need the invention of a God to appreciate the earth’s wonders." david f

How very true.

" I know some historians have suggested it was the concept of a divine being and his order that helped science to get off the ground in the 16th century or so because a divine being would create an ordered world. (But I haven't read many of those arguments in detail)." - Trav

I build mathematical models of societies in the context of knowledge discovery for a living and have rarely heard such rot in this conext. I would suggest that if one went back of the 100+ year history of the journals of the History of Science Society, no one would claim this one (exceptto study someone who did). I suggest you find some new historians.

The paths towards scientific discovery have been different for various civilizations. For example, China during the dynastic periods was slow and steady. The Chinese were good at experiment but not so good at theoretical science. What helped the West heaps was the Muslims retained much Greek knowledge and that knowledge was transferred to the West (largely through Spain). Putting theory and practice togther was the big thing. The Great Divergence was circa 1760. True science barely existed in the sixteen century.

If life is intelligent design; what of the billions years of years without life and all those empty planets out there? Life is a diminutive happenstance in the great ocean of entropic events. If God can zap-up some wine at a party; He suely doesn't need all the paraphernalia of the cosmos to create little ol' us.

I had planned short replies but have been drawn-in. Back to work.

Oliver: "Life is a diminutive happenstance in the great ocean of entropic events."

Beautifully put!

Dear Oliver,

You cited a reference when listed Astruc as an eighteenth century investigator. That is inaccurate.

Jean Astruc (Sauves, Auvergne, March 19, 1684 - Paris, May 5, 1766) was a professor of medicine at Montpellier and Paris, who wrote the first great treatise on syphilis and venereal diseases, and also, with a small anonymously published book, played a fundamental part in the origins of critical textual analysis of works of scripture. Astruc was the first to demonstrate — using the techniques of textual analysis that were commonplace in studying the secular classics — the theory that Genesis was composed based on several sources or manuscript traditions, an approach that is called the documentary hypothesis.

When one finds an inaccuracy in a reference one wonders how many other inaccuracies are in that reference.

david f writes 25.05 11:27:36,

Part 1
The same word may have different meanings. An example is the word, cleave. It means coming together as in "A man and his wife shall cleave together". It also separates as in "The butcher cleaver cleaves the meat."

Law is such a word.

I'm indebted to you in that you synthesised from my post the singular observation that one may break a man-made law but cannot break a law of nature.

Though the distinction is valid for the context, it is not entirely inclusive of the distinction to be made between NATURAL LAW and LAW OF NATURE. With regard to the former, the following link may resolve any confusion.
http://www.humanities.mq.edu.au/Ockham/wwill.html

I'm perfectly at ease with your observation that LAWS OF NATURE cannot be violated.

Equally, I'm at ease with the injunction that LAWS OF NATURE require no law-giver.

I regret that I failed to make that clear in my previous posts on P40.

I was, however, more concerned with the argument made by Paul Davies in the link provided by Trav on P46; In fact, science itself must be taken on faith, as the legendary atheist physicist Paul Davies explains in this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html). Wherein I found a number of contentious issues raised by Davies for which there were significant alternative views.
I was trying to argue against his faith-based imperative anent science by showing that his own faith argument led to the exact same imponderability and was a stop-gap measure of which William of Ockham would not approve.