A question which has always intrigued me

[Strange]

5 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

How do you explain that man was created in the image of god? While this could be interpreted in many ways the most straightforward interpretation is that man was created to look like god...

I have nothing to say about that.

If Itoero had used that argument, I would have had nothing to say. I was simply pointing out that his "A therefore B" argument was not logically coherent. (But pointing that out was probably redundant as it was, after all, a post by Itoero.)

[Moontanman]

1 minute ago, Strange said:

I have nothing to say about that.

If Itoero had used that argument, I would have had nothing to say. I was simply pointing out that his "A therefore B" argument was not logically coherent. (But pointing that out was probably redundant as it was, after all, a post by Itoero.)

Sorry, i missed that... 

Edited September 6, 2018 by Moontanman

[dimreepr]

6 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

How do you explain that man was created in the image of god? While this could be interpreted in many ways the most straightforward interpretation is that man was created to look like god..

Let's just imagine that God was meant to teach/support a concept that helps people live a contented life, wouldn't it be easier to imagine a human-like figure?

[Moontanman]

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

Let's just imagine that God was meant to teach/support a concept that helps people live a contented life, wouldn't it be easier to imagine a human-like figure?

I have no idea, all I know is what it says... 

[Itoero]

That's just what they believe. Their idea of God is obviously not 100% human, but they do ascribe human properties to their idea of God. He's often referred to as a sky daddy(in other words of course)….For many people God and Jesus are the same. And I met (on YouTube) several people that claim god talks to them in their sleep.

 

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, Moontanman said:

I have no idea, all I know is what it says... 

All any of us knows is what someone else says it says.

[Strange]

17 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Sorry, i missed that... 

That's OK. I suspect many people do think of their god as a person just like them, for the reason you gave and because we always anthropomorphise things.

[DirtyChai]

On 7/12/2018 at 3:35 PM, beecee said:

The bible is nothing more then a collection of these myths, written in an obscure age by obscure men/women, to explain the universe around them. Then science came along.

The vast majority of the bible has nothing to do with ancient perspectives of the universe, nor how the natural world works.  The creation story for example is barely a page and a half long.

 

On 7/12/2018 at 2:30 AM, Strange said:

How do you know that it is accurate? It is a very old text that has been copied by hand, translated, edited, copied, translated again, copied, translated, ... There seems a lot of scope for errors there.

We know that scribal transmission of Hebrew scriptures was a rather meticulous undertaking.

- Each column had to have between 48 and 60 lines.
- Each word had to be verbalized before copying it.
- Every paragraph, word and letter had to be counted.
- The middle paragraph, middle word and middle letter of every page had to correspond to  the manuscript being copied.
- If any letters touched each other it was voided.
- if more than 2 pages needed any minor corrections then the manuscript had to be rewritten.

The reliability of this process was validated by the Dead Sea Scrolls that had  a 95% word for word accuracy rate when compared to Masoretic manuscripts written a thousand years later.

 

5 hours ago, Itoero said:

For many people God and Jesus are the same.

Correct, Jesus is believed to be God incarnate, but apart from that, one could also  believe that God is an invisible omnipresent force, given the text.

 

6 hours ago, Eise said:

The Gospels that made it into the New Testament were written between 60-110 CE. That is not 'centuries'. The oldest copies we have are from around the 4^th century (Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus).

It should also be noted that while those two "complete" versions were dated around the 4th century,  there are also individual manuscripts dating back to 125-250 CE

[Moontanman]

12 minutes ago, DirtyChai said:

The vast majority of the bible has nothing to do with ancient perspectives of the universe, nor how the natural world works.  The creation story for example is barely a page and a half long.

Everything the Bible states about the natural world that can be checked is wrong and it has quite a bit more than 1.5 pages to say... 

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_scientific_errors

Quote

 

We know that scribal transmission of Hebrew scriptures was a rather meticulous undertaking.

- Each column had to have between 48 and 60 lines.
- Each word had to be verbalized before copying it.
- Every paragraph, word and letter had to be counted.
- The middle paragraph, middle word and middle letter of every page had to correspond to  the manuscript being copied.
- If any letters touched each other it was voided.
- if more than 2 pages needed any minor corrections then the manuscript had to be rewritten.

Citation please

Quote

The reliability of this process was validated by the Dead Sea Scrolls that had  a 95% word for word accuracy rate when compared to Masoretic manuscripts written a thousand years later.

Citation please

Quote

 

Correct, Jesus is believed to be God incarnate, but apart from that, one could also  believe that God is an invisible omnipresent force, given the text.

Jesus never said that... 

Quote

 

It should also be noted that while those two "complete" versions were dated around the 4th century,  there are also individual manuscripts dating back to 125-250 CE

What would be your point? these mythological tales were written down accurately? I'd like to see a citation for those manuscripts that date back to 125 to 250 ce as well... 

Edited September 6, 2018 by Moontanman

[beecee]

5 minutes ago, DirtyChai said:

The vast majority of the bible has nothing to do with ancient perspectives of the universe, nor how the natural world works.  The creation story for example is barely a page and a half long.

The beginning of the bible purports to start the giant myth that God created this universe in 7 days...the rest of the nonsense stems from that, the core and foundation.

Quote

 

We know that scribal transmission of Hebrew scriptures was a rather meticulous undertaking.

- Each column had to have between 48 and 60 lines.
- Each word had to be verbalized before copying it.
- Every paragraph, word and letter had to be counted.
- The middle paragraph, middle word and middle letter of every page had to correspond to  the manuscript being copied.
- If any letters touched each other it was voided.
- if more than 2 pages needed any minor corrections then the manuscript had to be rewritten.

The reliability of this process was validated by the Dead Sea Scrolls that had  a 95% word for word accuracy rate when compared to Masoretic manuscripts written a thousand years later.

 

That;s beside the point of the whole mythical situation that the bible would have us believe.

[Strange]

22 minutes ago, DirtyChai said:

The creation story for example is barely a page and a half long.

But it is there twice (for some reason).

[studiot]

1 hour ago, Strange said:

But it is there twice (for some reason).

The difference between that which was written in Alexandria and that which was written in Jerusalem?

There two (different) versions of quite a few events in the Old Testament due to this effect I understand.

[Strange]

5 minutes ago, studiot said:

The difference between that which was written in Alexandria and that which was written in Jerusalem?

There two (different) versions of quite a few events in the Old Testament due to this effect I understand.

Maybe. I have never known (or looked into) the reason. 

[Eise]

10 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Everything the Bible states about the natural world that can be checked is wrong and it has quite a bit more than 1.5 pages to say... 

Of course there are these kind of errors. But except the beginning of Genesis, the Bible is not meant to be a book that describes how the natural world works. It is stories about the Jewish people.

16 hours ago, Moontanman said:

We have no originals or evidence other than said copies to confirm what they claim about themselves. As you know they cannot be evidence of themselves.. 

Of course. But based on carbon dating, text analysis, language (and language errors), text comparisons (not unlike creating a genealogy of DNA by means of its mutations; AFAIK genetic algorithms were used to analyse old manuscripts), writing style, historical events reported that we have independent knowledge of, history of ideas, artifacts found on the same premises as documents etc, it is possible to extract the history of those documents. As this picture becomes clearer and clearer, it becomes possible to draw conclusions of what described in the documents might be factual.

16 hours ago, Moontanman said:

While I have seen such claims I haven't read them myself (I do not read latin or greek)and a google search turned up nothing but pages and pages of religious nonsense... 

I predict you find none. It is a myth, set into the world by mythicists...

10 hours ago, Moontanman said:

What would be your point? these mythological tales were written down accurately? I'd like to see a citation for those manuscripts that date back to 125 to 250 ce as well... 

You originally said that the copies we have of the New Testament were written about thousand year later. As you already accepted, we have comlete manuscripts from the 4^th century. But there are older fragments. I assume DirtyChai is e.g. referring to the Rylands Library Papyrus P52 fragment, which contains a tiny part of the Gospel of John, dated between 125-175 CE. That is pretty short after historians estimate the Gospel of John was written (around 90 CE). Interesting enough this is the latest Gospel.

10 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Jesus never said that... 

That is true, but DirtyChai also did not mean that Jesus said that. It was a later theological development. See e.g. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.

[DirtyChai]

16 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Everything the Bible states about the natural world that can be checked is wrong and it has quite a bit more than 1.5 pages to say... 

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biblical_scientific_errors

That link lists about 10 different sentences from various parts of the bible, so that brings us up to about 1.75 pages.

 

16 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Quote

We know that scribal transmission of Hebrew scriptures was a rather meticulous undertaking.

- Each column had to have between 48 and 60 lines.
- Each word had to be verbalized before copying it.
- Every paragraph, word and letter had to be counted.
- The middle paragraph, middle word and middle letter of every page had to correspond to  the manuscript being copied.
- If any letters touched each other it was voided.
- if more than 2 pages needed any minor corrections then the manuscript had to be rewritten.

Citation please

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe#Judaism

https://scottmanning.com/content/process-of-copying-the-old-testament-by-jewish-scribes/

https://bible.org/seriespage/5-transmission

 

16 hours ago, Moontanman said:

Quote

The reliability of this process was validated by the Dead Sea Scrolls that had  a 95% word for word accuracy rate when compared to Masoretic manuscripts written a thousand years later.

Citation please

http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222016000400037
"The Dead Sea Scrolls indeed are holding up to their reputation after more than 65 years of research, and we will have to see whether this can be said of the latest discovery in the Judaean desert. This study demonstrated that some scrolls correspond to a large extent with the MT - 1QIsaa is an appropriate example."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls#Biblical_significance
"This was a significant discovery for Old Testament scholars who anticipated that the Dead Sea Scrolls would either affirm or repudiate the reliability of textual transmission from the original texts to the oldest Masoretic texts at hand. The discovery demonstrated the unusual accuracy of transmission over a thousand-year period, rendering it reasonable to believe that current Old Testament texts are reliable copies of the original works."

 

http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah
"The Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) is one of the original seven Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in Qumran in 1947. It is the largest (734 cm) and best preserved of all the biblical scrolls, and the only one that is almost complete. The 54 columns contain all 66 chapters of the Hebrew version of the biblical Book of Isaiah. Dating from ca. 125 BCE, it is also one of the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some one thousand years older than the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible known to us before the scrolls' discovery.

"Through the activity of generations of sages (known as "Masoretes"), who faithfully preserved and transmitted the sacred words across centuries, an authoritative or Masoretic version of the Hebrew Bible gradually evolved, containing its definitive correct text, proper vocalization, and accentuation marks. The Aleppo Codex, transcribed by the scribe Solomon son of Buya'a and annotated by the scholar Aaron ben Asher in the 10th century CE in the Galilean city of Tiberias, is considered the finest extant example of this version."

 

http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/bible_isaiahscroll.html

The major difference between the Aleppo Codex and the Dead Sea Scrolls is the addition of the vowel pointings (called nikkudot in Hebrew) in the Aleppo Codex to the Hebrew words. These pointings provide the vowel sounds that are not present in the Hebrew language and were probably inserted into the text to standardize the pronunciation of the Hebrew words in the text.

The name ישראל (Israel) in a Dead Sea Scroll (left) and the Aleppo Codex (right)

 

 

Archer, Gleason. A Survey of Old Testament Introduction. Chicago: Moody Press, 1985.
"Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text."

 

16 hours ago, Moontanman said:

I'd like to see a citation for those manuscripts that date back to 125 to 250 ce as well.

Here, you can sort them by date:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri#Papyrus_1–50

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri#Papyrus_51–100

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri#Papyrus_101–

 

16 hours ago, beecee said:

The beginning of the bible purports to start the giant myth that God created this universe in 7 days...the rest of the nonsense stems from that, the core and foundation.

Wouldn't subsequent text depend only on the idea that God created, rather than how he created it?

Furthermore, one could say that the core and foundation is Jesus Christ.  One doesn't even need to read the OT to become a Christian, nor do they need an understanding of the universe to apply christian principles to their lives.

 

16 hours ago, beecee said:

That;s beside the point of the whole mythical situation that the bible would have us believe.

It was simply an answer to a question.

[iNow]

1 hour ago, DirtyChai said:

That link lists about 10 different sentences from various parts of the bible, so that brings us up to about 1.75 pages.

Just to be pedantic, an average sentence has about 15 words (source). This means that there are a total of 150 words in the set you've defined (10 sentences x 15 words).

The average bible has 807,370 words across an average of 1,200 pages (source) making an average of 673 words per page.

Thus if there are 10 sentences such as you claim, that would represent only 0.22 pages, barely one quarter of one page, not 1.75 pages as claimed.

Now... Regardless of pedantry, this whole line of argument IMO is ridiculous on its face and a waste of time for any moderately intelligent mind. 

[DirtyChai]

39 minutes ago, iNow said:

2 hours ago, DirtyChai said:

That link lists about 10 different sentences from various parts of the bible, so that brings us up to about 1.75 pages.

Just to be pedantic, an average sentence has about 15 words (source). This means that there are a total of 150 words in the set you've defined (10 sentences x 15 words).

The average bible has 807,370 words across an average of 1,200 pages (source) making an average of 673 words per page.

Thus if there are 10 sentences such as you claim, that would represent only 0.22 pages, barely one quarter of one page, not 1.75 pages as claimed.

Right, I started with the 1.5 pages of the creation story  plus the 10 sentences from the wiki link for a total of about 1.75 pages.

In all honesty, I was just trying to use a bit of subtle humor in phrasing it that way.   It made me chuckle.

 

40 minutes ago, iNow said:

Now... Regardless of pedantry, this whole line of argument IMO is ridiculous on its face and a waste of time for any moderately intelligent mind.

The whole point of this was to illustrate how the Bible wasn't really written to explain the universe around us as beecee claimed. 

[beecee]

7 hours ago, DirtyChai said:

Wouldn't subsequent text depend only on the idea that God created, rather than how he created it?

The whole text from beginning to end rests on nothing more than mythical nonsense, unscientific at best, and a total lack of evidence at worst.

Quote

Furthermore, one could say that the core and foundation is Jesus Christ.  One doesn't even need to read the OT to become a Christian, nor do they need an understanding of the universe to apply christian principles to their lives.

One can say whatever he likes, whether it is fabricated nonsense or otherwise. While I have never  gone into the actual total content of the dead sea scrolls, what I have read from reputable origins, is that it is simply a collection of the practices and beliefs of ancient Judaism. Nothing re some character called jesus or any associated supernatural powers. Perhaps one day a thousand years hence, someone will also uncover written collections re the practices and beliefs of today.

Quote

It was simply an answer to a question.

OK, but my point stands. It has SFA to do with anything that even looks like validating any creation myth.

Quote

The whole point of this was to illustrate how the Bible wasn't really written to explain the universe around us as beecee claimed. 

Yet it claims that in the beginning this magical person created the universe in seven days...I smell some pedant!

Edited September 7, 2018 by beecee

[Moontanman]

16 hours ago, Eise said:

 

 

7 hours ago, DirtyChai said:

 

Is there any chance that there are any citations from people who not have vested interest in the fairy tales being true! 

[Eise]

15 hours ago, beecee said:

While I have never  gone into the actual total content of the dead sea scrolls, what I have read from reputable origins, is that it is simply a collection of the practices and beliefs of ancient Judaism. Nothing re some character called jesus or any associated supernatural powers.

Nobody is saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain stories about Jesus. They simply don't. Nobody here did suggest that they do. But what they show is that some Jewish sects believed that soon a Messiah would come, to reinstall the rule of God, and end the suffering of the people of Israel. And interesting enough, this is exactly what John the Baptist and Jesus were preaching. So for the history of early Christianity this is a valuable background. We have new evidence that such ideas already existed in Jesus' days. (The Dead Sea scrolls are dated from 385 BCE to 82 CE).

[Moontanman]

1 hour ago, Eise said:

Nobody is saying that the Dead Sea Scrolls contain stories about Jesus. They simply don't. Nobody here did suggest that they do. But what they show is that some Jewish sects believed that soon a Messiah would come, to reinstall the rule of God, and end the suffering of the people of Israel. And interesting enough, this is exactly what John the Baptist and Jesus were preaching. So for the history of early Christianity this is a valuable background. We have new evidence that such ideas already existed in Jesus' days. (The Dead Sea scrolls are dated from 385 BCE to 82 CE).

Except that Jesus didn't do any of those things and evidence of an actual Jesus is not validated by ideas... 

[dimreepr]

Just now, Moontanman said:

Except that Jesus didn't do any of those things and evidence of an actual Jesus is not validated by ideas... 

You can't say both...

[Moontanman]

Just now, dimreepr said:

You can't say both...

I just did, please explain why that is not true... 

[dimreepr]

7 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Jesus is not validated by ideas... 

But he is by historical evidence.

9 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Except that Jesus didn't do any of those things

If you doubt that he even existed how can you be sure?

[Moontanman]

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

But he is by historical evidence.

Quote

Messiah would come, to reinstall the rule of God, and end the suffering of the people of Israel

This did not happen...

1 minute ago, dimreepr said:

If you doubt that he even existed how can you be sure?

Show me some evidence he ever existed...