An Assertion...

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I don't have any.



I don't have any!


I don't have any! Geez, stop asking!

I'm just saying, your comments about how Jesus "doesn't matter" don't seem to make sense. Nobody has ever claimed that Jesus is extremely important simply because he was crucified. Lots of people were crucified. And even if he isn't the Son of God, he is still extremely important. I mean, have you ever noticed this thing called Christianity?

Last edited by Declension on 17 Feb 2012, 11:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Since bats can be lumped in with birds on the basis that they all have wings, I've decided that all land-dwelling creatures without wings are wombats It's as good a name as any other. Wombats don't have wings, you don't have wings either (I assume. Correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore you must be a wombat.

Ok, but it doesn't go inline with the English language that I know of. In my English language, wombat means "a burrowing plant-eating Australian marsupial (family Vombatidae) that resembles a small bear with short legs".

If you accept that your definition of "wombat" is not popular according to the modern culture and the modern language supposedly being used, then fine with me, I'm a wombat according to you.

I did not say that Jesus "Doesn't Matter" - I asked essentially why He should make a difference to anyone who is not a Jew, a Greek, or a Latin scholar.


Don't lie about what I've said. The rest of your post goes off on a wild tangent.

Last edited by Fnord on 17 Feb 2012, 11:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'll repeat my reply in the other bats / birds / pi thread over here too:

This sums up my argument, and I don't think there is any point for me to continue to debate arbitrary and inaccurate colloquial nomenclature versus accurate scientific nomenclature.

I was trying to answer this question. It isn't a real question, is it? I mean, you can't really feign ignorance on this point, especially since you already said that you go to Sunday School! Maybe I read the question wrong: does the question really mean "why should I believe that Christianity is true?"

If that's what the question means, then I can only repeat that I am not a Christian. I have heard evidence for Christianity before, but each time it wasn't good enough for me, and I've mostly forgotten what it was. Stuff about the empty tomb, personal revelation, etc.

EDIT: But it should be noted that I don't think that all Christians have become Christians by looking at evidence. In fact, I bet most of them haven't. In most cases, people are Christians because it "works for them". It gives them a sense of transcendence, belonging, etc. In other words, they are using a pragmatic method to choose what to believe, not an intellectual method.

The last sentence doesn't follow. What does "involved" mean? What if God did magic stuff and people saw it and recorded it happening? Does that count as God being "involved"?

I personally think that it is obvious that the category simply used to contain bats, and doesn't anymore. But even if it is a "mistake", let's try to keep in mind what we established at the start. The Bible being dictated by God is not a mainstream Christian position.

It is a modern fudge to think of there being a single book called "the Bible". In fact, it is many books, and none of them are ever claimed by modern theologians to have been dictated by God. (The closest would maybe be Revelation, which is allegedly the recording of a vision which was allegedly sent from God.) The key portion of the Bible, for Christians, is the Gospels. They are not supposed to be dictated by God, they are supposed to be eyewitness accounts. And just like you'd expect, they are all slightly different, because (so the story goes) the different authors remembered/heard about different bits. (Actually I think it's because the authors copied each other with slight modifications.)

Your method of debunking Christianity would work much better for debunking Islam.

i think the main argument here is against fundementalist christians, ie. the people that will try to argue with the bible as a source.

But you can argue using the Bible without believing that the Bible was dictated by God! If you are a mainstream Christian, then you believe that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts of miraculous events that prove that Jesus was the son of God. So you could use the Bible as evidence, in the same way that you could use an eyewitness account in a court of law.

perhaps but what actual real world value would it have?

you have absolutely no way of ensuring the reliability of that eyewitness account (something that in itself is extremely hard even when the person is alive and willing to coorporate)
then add the impossibility of knowing the intention of whats written as well and that the shift of perspective over 2000 years has its effects as well.

esentially it is no more accurate or belieavble than many of the stories passed by word of mouth, you dont know what misinterpretations they made in that day,


so sure you can argue from it but i dont see much objective wheight in it, not more than i do in the illiad for an example, you can certainly learn things regardless of faith but in the end it does not serve as a very strong argument unless you make the a priori assumption that god exists.

I agree with you. I was just trying to correct a sort of blurring that has been happening in this thread, where people seem to be equating "Christianity is true" with "the Bible is dictated by God". I mean, I am aware that there are some fundies who might say silly things like that. But this doesn't make any sense, even from a Christian point of view! I mean, how can the Gospels be written by God? They are clearly supposed to be records of what happened written by eyewitnesses or people who have heard from eyewitnesses.

I think that this confusion might have happened because of the phrase "Word of God", which is sort of ambiguous. It could mean "written by God", or it could mean "what God has told/shown us".

i dont think anyone actually thinks it is written in a literal sense,

but there is the invocation to the word of god, to push upon it special meaning according to what the believer desires,
in that equation we would then have to account for human bias, the most destructive thing to the truth there exists.

Fundies typically believe that God himself inspired every word in the Bible. What they mean by "inspire" is very ambiguous and circumstantial (definition changes with every argument you make against the Bible).

My coworker thinks the bible is word for word literal, and dictated from the word of god. He also claims that to doubt any portion of the bible, is to doubt the whole thing, and be damned to hellfire for blasphemy.

It is an odd claim, and logically flawed beyond belief. What is interesting, is even when the logical flaws are pointed out, he fluidly changes the context, subject, or definition of any and everything necessary to "make" it make sense (to him). I marvel at how fluid this is for him, to think in patterns so foreign to rational thought as to be completely alien to me and inconceivable.

None the less, there are fundies, I work with one. Supposedly, his whole church takes the stance that the bible is the literal word of god and 100% accurate.

He also says the big bang "thing" could not be real, because god made everything the way it is now. And evolution just doesn't make any sense at all, because how can things evolve if god made every kind of creature there is already. He also speculates that since we can't watch a human being evolve, even if things did somehow do it, humans don't, since no human has ever spontaneously turned into something else.

Oddly, outside of religion, he is completely rational, capable, and modestly intelligent. Once the religion conversation comes up, he is delusional. Very peculiar, I find it incredibly curious how this happens.

OK - let's see: Leviticus 11:20 - New International Version (©1984)
All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you (plus all the other translations - http://scripturetext.com/leviticus/11-20.htm)

which is a translation of the כֹּל שֶׁרֶץ הָעוֹף, הַהֹלֵךְ עַל-אַרְבַּע--שֶׁקֶץ הוּא, לָכֶם.

the literal translation, word for word goes: All/any creeping thing/vermin/insect/reptile winged walk on four are detestable

which makes it rather loose translation/interpretation in English to turn it into legs or limbs of any sort - since עַל־אַרְבַּ֑ע means "on four" and no legs were mentioned whatsoever in the original text. English version was a translation of Vulgate where four limbs can be traced (Jerome's translation of the Septuaginta from the fifth century AD) - omne de volucribus quod graditur super quattuor pedes abominabile erit vobis (All of winged/flying (creatures) that walk on four legs (quattuor pedes) are abominable to you.)

No matter how we turn or twist the limb/leg issue it refers to some unknown four legged flying creature (from the perspective of zoology) unless pterosaurs were still alive and eaten at that time in the Middle East. It most likely pertained to insects that for whatever reasons writer of the Leviticus thought to be abominable to eat.

Look, I don't care how ancient those people were. They still should've been able to count.

Maybe they all collectively stuffed it up and counted the legs wrong, but I really doubt that these people who were used to nature more than this world of industries and technology would get it wrong.

I think this whole confusion is arising from the fact that some secular people of the current age are misunderstanding the "walk on four" and thinking it must imply that it was thought they only had four limbs.

I'm curious what the secular experts qualified to critically analyze these texts have to say. They should know something we don't.