Why are Christians so incredibly gullible?

I asked you how or why do you believe the literal writings in the Old Testament such as Adam and Eve, Noah, Genesis...etc?

AboveAlpha

 

I'm not applying for the Job "clever poster", nor did I see it posted. Have you got anything to add?

 

Could the Babylonian creation story have been copied from the Israelite version?

 

Any particular reason that after so many times I have asked you still will not answer my question?

AboveAlpha

 

Genesis 12 says Abram worshipped Jehovah.

 

and I said because it testifies to its truthfulness.

- - - Updated - - -

I've already answered.

 

Exactly what testifies to what's truthfulness?

AboveAlpha

 

What religion? I was not talking about religion. The Bible is not about a religion.

 

You are ignoring the fact that what happened all of Noah's sons and their children is where all the Nations and tribes came from....Just after the flood all people spoke one language and no separate Nations as we have today. This was where they wanted to built a tower because they did not wanted to spread out, but God caused confusion and then the separated in tribes that became Nations.


So naturally they would no doubt some kind of account of the flood, that would be similar to what is recording in the Bible. It only proves that the Bible said did happen. Of course over time as it always is things might be added or taken out.

 

Actually I had a rather sound sleep last night.

The main question I have is: why would you want to get a rise out of me? Do you think getting a rise out of people is more likely to swing their opinion towards your arguments?

If so, you’re wrong. What I’ve been trying to tell you is that a confrontational style is more likely to do the opposite. Admittedly I wish I heeded my own advice more often. Alas, I myself tend to be an impatient, vain, know-it-all smartass, which does not help.

Which leads me to my second question: Did you bother to read the links I posted?
They probably won’t get a rise out of anybody, but they may show you once again why your “Red/Reed Sea-Pet-Topic” is utterly unexciting for most Christians, even for most of those Christians who believe in Biblical inerrancy.
Seriously: I think to get a vague clue about the various Christian concepts of Biblical inerrancy/Biblical infallibility may benefit this threads discussion for everybody concerned.

 

Sorry...an error in my typing.

My question was what Bible do you specifically use or is specific to your chosen religion if you have one?

AboveAlpha

 

Forgive me for saying that you seem to know very little about “Christian Doctrine”.

You should start to distinguish between what the Bible infers and what people think it infers. The Bible infers many different things to many different people holding many different beliefs.

Is it well documented? Not in the link you gave. Just out of interest: Who was burned to death for believing that?

Not that I’d put it entirely past Catholics and Protestants to have done that, but at the moment I can just think of one burned person that may spring to mind here, and of that one person the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” tells us that he was burned for entirely different reasons:

"Pope Clement VII (r. 1523–1534) had reacted favorably to a talk about Copernicus's theories, rewarding the speaker with a rare manuscript. There is no indication of how Pope Paul III, to whom On the Revolutions was dedicated reacted; however, a trusted advisor, Bartolomeo Spina of Pisa (1474–1546) intended to condemn it but fell ill and died before his plan was carried out (see Rosen, 1975). Thus, in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology, and this is clearly shown in Finocchiaro's reconstruction of the accusations against Bruno (see also Blumenberg's part 3, chapter 5, titled “Not a Martyr for Copernicanism: Giordano Bruno”)."
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/copernicus/

However, heliocentrism is a good example for how important it is in which way arguments are put forward. Had Galileo not made so many enemies among his colleagues with his abrasive ways there would probably not been much of a fuss about heliocentrism. And just as a side remark: as far as I know the Church never supported the view that the earth was flat, that's just a common prejudice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth.

 

I don't have a religion because the Bible is not about a religion (basically the Bible is about the kingdom of God's or desire to extend or expand His kingdom from Heaven) and I have and use all Bible translations.......they are all the same just worded slightly differently.

 

Wow!

After reading that reply I guess I DID get a rise out of you! LOL!

I have not read much of the links as I have a very large and long list of replies to my posts that I have been working at all night. But I will get around to it.

Regardless though...the reality upon ALL BIBLICAL VERSIONS be it the King James or the Koran or the Torah...or whatever Christian Bible of the Month Flavor you might be reading...the facts are that there does not exist a single solitary original Gospel, Text, Book or whatever was translated and used to make the current Bible you are reading that is an original copy of the Author or Apostle.

They are all copies of copies of copies that were hidden in various places from the Romans prior to Constantine.

As well the chosen Gospels are not those of all the Gospels written as the Gospels of Mary, Judas, Paul...etc..

As well there are many books that were specifically not chosen to be placed in the Bible such as...The book of Jubilees
Epistle of Barnabas
Shepherd of Hermas
Paul's Epistle to the Laodiceans
1 Clement
2 Clement
Preaching of Peter
Apocalypse of Peter
Gospel According to the Egyptians
Gospel According to the Hebrews

The reason why the Gospel of Judas, Mary, Paul...etc...were not placed in the New Testament is that these Gospels stated that Jesus taught that ALL MEN COULD BE THE SON'S OF GOD BY FOLLOWING HIS TEACHINGS. This is contrary to the Gospels in the Bible stating that Jesus was the actual SON OF GOD.

As far as the Old Testament is concerned...well it is absolutely OBVIOUS that most of this is simply either made up stories to be used as a teaching tool for morality....or taking parts of History with a bit of creative license to make such stories a teaching tool as well.

The Great Flood caused by the Land Mass collapsing and creating the Turkish Straits and thus the Aegean Sea and Black Sea were connected causing a massive flood due to conflicting sea levels that lasted 300 days back in 5600 BC...thus the Noah story was partly true but it is OBVIOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE for what is written in the Old Testament to be true as there does not exist enough water on Earth even if all ice melted to cover the Earth's land masses. You would need 3X the current amount of water to do this.

AboveAlpha

 

speaking of things obviously made up!

 

Thanks for the defense, but I'm not worried about "talking myself into a corner", because I can and may be wrong about some things. I don't claim to have all of the answers and as Paul stated in a paraphrase by me, "I'm a fool for Christ". Where I'm weak He is strong, where He's right, I can be wrong. I have no problem being wrong, and if I "back myself in a corner", I'll just acknowledge that I misspoke, and try to re-think my position.

 

2 Timothy 3:14-17
New American Standard Bible (NASB)

14 You, however, continue in the things you have learned and become convinced of, knowing from whom you have learned them, 15 and that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; 17 so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.

 

What we do know is that according to the Bible, Noah and Shem were still alive at the time of Abraham and Shem would have lived in close proximity to Abram and his father Terah who grew up in UR. We are told in Joshua that Terah worshiped Gods other than YHWH.

Since Noah and Shem are still alive they would have been known to everyone living on the earth at that time. Terah would have probably met Noah or Shem a few times or at least seen them and certainly taken part in festivals celebrating the Great Grandfathers of all humanity.

It is a ridiculous mind-bending to think that people living both during the lifetime of Moses and Shem, and in close proximity to these fellows, would believe in Gods other than what Moses and his son believed in.



WHAT?

The long lives of the ancients is more likely to have been an error by a scribe in using the sumerian numbering system (60) rather than the semetic (10).

I don't think that the estimated 2-3 million inhabitants of Egypt, and the countless millions of the rest of the world of the time had any idea of what was even happening in Mesopotamia.

To actually accept that the whole earth flooded is incredulous. If rain water floods an area of land it lowers the water level elsewhere. To flood Asia and Everest would probably take the water of the Atlantic ocean, leaving that dry. I suggest that event would be enough to start new religions in what is now the US and South America and the Atlantic Coast of Europe and Africa.

I may be misreading your post but Moses and Shem were not contemporary.

I agree with some of your translations - eg El etc.

I do not believe we can accept the first 5 books of the Tanakh as literal. There is no evidence for much of the events such as slavery in Egypt, the Exodus etc. 2m people leaving Egypt and not a mention in Egypt. That's about 2/5ths of the estimate population. With all their herds, flocks, personal belongings (tents etc) It would form a queue several deep almost from the Egyptian border to the Promised land. The logistics problem would give our present world a headache. Then - no.
40 years. Tonnes of food everyday for people and animals. Lakefuls of water every day.

 

It must have slipped your memory that I once studied theology at an accredited German university for a bit. So you are kind of bringing owls to Athens here, if admittedly a very rusted “Athens” in this case: it’s ages that I had to occupy myself with textual criticism, the history of canonization etc. and I was never a genius in it in the first place.

These days I very rarely bother to refer back to my (by now outdated) “Novum Testamentum Graece” and its critical apparatus, on which most modern Bible translations of the New Testament are based, but here and there I still get back to it. But I suppose you also never got around to read the link about it that I recently gave you. Here is it again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece

And without going into detail just a little tip: you should look out for more profound academic sources if you want to make informed statements about the process of canonization rather than just falling prey to popular conspiracy theories. As you surely know “The Da Vinci Code” for example is not a valid source. Here is a link from which to start if you are seriously interested in Biblical Studies:
http://books.google.de/books?id=QnG...&sa=X&ei=CCrpUb3QNMm7OarrgfAC&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA

One thing I am interested in: which “Gospel of Paul” never made it into a canon? Never heard of such a book. Did I miss something? Or did you mean the “Acts of Paul” by any chance?

 

Problems of circular logic aside: Surely you know that 2. Timothy was written before the Bible as we know it now was begun to be canonized. So not only is it not entirely clear what the author (who was very likely not Paul) meant by “inspired", it’s also not entirely clear which exact scriptures the author referred to, certainly not to the NT as we know it now.
What I am certain of is that the author can't have meant that you have to hold every account of the OT to be literally true in the way some modern-day creationists believe those accounts to be literally true. People in antiquity did not think in such terms and unlike us they were still rather versed in symbolism.

 

Yes...actually it did. Joshua 10:13- "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

Notice it doesn't say "the Earth ceased rotating"....it says "the sun stood still" (and even links that to the moon "staying").....clearly indicating the author of Joshua thought that the Sun rotated around the Earth as the Moon did.

Thus....Ptolemaic geocentrism, not Copernican heliocentrism.

 

Actually you could flood the earth if you levelled the land mass, and brought the sea beds up to the same level. The water would lay on top. But this would mean 2 cataclyspic events in which no-one could survive, Ark or not.

Agree the Mediterranean/Aegean/Black Sea event.

Regarding the other Gospels etc. etc. There are around 60+ Gospels, Resurrection, Gospel of.., Infancy gospels and so on.
The reason many were not included was for various reasons, IMO. Some were incomplete, some were written for selfish reasons (where the writer claims personal, private conversations with Jesus). Others were purely nonsense - in the infancy Gospels Jesus is depicted as vindictive, killing a child and then raising him from the dead, and other incidents.

I won't contradict your claim because this is true in the case of the Gnostic Gospels, some of which were found at Nag Hammadi.

I think the book of Isaiah found in the Dead Sea Scrolls is remarkably close to the one we have today, but accept most of the rest.

And it's not often I agree with people.

 

Considering that the Sumerian flood myth came from the 18th century BC... No.

 

Well, as I believe in verbal plenary inspiration, and the omniscience of God, I can't see how it could be wrong, but we don't need to rehash these same disagreements that we've had in the past.