nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Maybe so. Thanks for the best wishes.

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Why is a man who worships science, deifies it, and assumes that science is the ultimate authority over the universe incapable of applying the scientific standards of objectivity, inductive and deductive reasoning, critical thought, and logic toward the search for t***h in a book that has had a profound impact on human life for nearly 2000 years?

The scientific methods of discovery and research follow a logical sequence from hypothesis through experimentation and observation to the conclusion. This process of reasoning can have only two outcomes, either the conclusion proves the hypothesis correct, or it doesn't. If the hypothesis is proven correct, it provides the foundation for the next step along the road to discovery. If the hypothesis is incorrect, you go back and rethink it, change parameters, adjust the experiments, and try again.

In your approach to the Bible, and religion in general, the logic, reasoning, and critical thought inherent in the scientific method are absent. You come at it from a highly prejudicial perspective with preconceived notions of what the object of your ire is all about. The basis of your approach to all things spiritual or religious, the driving force behind your approach, is hostility. Your hypothesis and your conclusions on this subject are one and the same--God does not exist, Jesus is a myth, the Bible is fiction, its authors unknown. Period, end of story.

As with the majority of atheists, you will go to great lengths in your attempts to prove your conclusion correct, including using passages from the Bible itself.

For the next month, Nik, ask everyone you see if they have ever heard of Moses, or king David, or Solomon, or Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, or Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Peter, Paul and James. How about Ruth and Esther? If I felt that providing you with research and study of Bible authors by scholars, historians, and theologians would somehow prove fruitful, I'd pass it along.

The Bible is composed of 66 books written by 42 authors over a period of 15 centuries. It is not possible for a work of fiction to emerge from the writings of 40 men and 2 women, few of whom ever knew each other, most of whom lived ages apart, and all of whom had a common purpose. From "In the beginning" to the final Amen, there is a universal thread of t***h that binds it all together.

We are at Stalemate, Nik, always have been, religion and atheism are diametrically opposed to each other, as a whole and in general, the gap between religious principles and atheist dogma is unbridgeable, "never the twain shall meet". This is not to say that individual humans have never. shall we say, "switched sides", but at the foundation of religious and atheistic beliefs, they are wholly incompatible.

No other living creature except humans were given the gift of choice. You made your choice, I made mine. Are we cool?

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

It's impossible to prove something DOESN'T exist.

Iliamna1

Sorry. Nikolai knew it was he I was addressing.

Nickolai

https://youtu.be/14hTQBfZvkY
That's precisely the problem the time 2000 years. The evidence points to around 650 BC as the time period that the old testament was written. When the Israelites were ens***ed in Babylon and it was about stories that allegedly occurred centuries earlier and could easily be threaded together by Jewish scribes during their time of ens***ement

And stories change as they are told over and over. I've told jokes to a guy in a big shop and a month later after making the rounds herd the same joke but changed slightly. People hear things and even see things differently. Imagine writing in 650 BC the story of Joseph 1,000 years after the fact from an oral tradition how the story could be altered in myriad ways. The story of Joseph, Moses, David Solomon, were not written at the time they allegedly occurred, but much later. None of those stories come to us outside of the Bible that have any validity


There is no such thing as atheist dogma. Unbelief is not a dogma. There is no atheist authority or any set of principles. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in the supernatural. And yes of course we are cool why not we are both homo sapiens, brothers under the skin

Nickolai

https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g

The Pale Blue Dot

CounterRevolutionary

Not to worry, OPP is like an old fashioned land party-line with everybody listening in to a dozen conversations at once.

CounterRevolutionary

Nickolai, something else is happening.

First of all, the Jews, with domesticated animals, mostly sheep and cattle, were a literate tribe of nomads like no others in history and wrote things down. Go back to the clay tablet tales in cuneiform of Noah's Ark, aka Gilgamesh Epic, in two separate languages with a dictionary between the two tribes, on clay tablets at Ebla, a seacoast town in western Syria some 8,000 years ago.

This is real, not verbal folk lore passed down in chants. There are archaeology digs at Thera today uncovering a buried city some 300 feet below the volcanic ash.

One language is a conglomerate of ancient Phoenician and Hebrew, the other ancient Syriac. There were huge upheavals in migration, the "sea people" invading foreign countries after an enormous volcanic eruption on the Greek Island of Thera, resulting in tsunamis and ash falls that wiped out crops, fodder, and spawned famines that swept the entire Mediterranean civilization.

As human cave-art evolved with stick people hunting animals to full fledged portraits of individual people with specific features and personalities, there was an awakening in the human conscience of the value of each individual as a special human being. We are not an ant farm.

Humans, being mammals, have a closer personal empathy and bonding with their mate and offspring. They also have an inner consciousness of their individual soul above and beyond their material body and can perceive a spiritual world and its Maker. Read this prayer offered at Samuel Barber's funeral service that he himself selected; Barber who was gay, but in no way an atheist, was the leading American classical composer of his time:

ORDER OF SERVICE (Samuel Osborne Barber died January 23, 1981)
PRAYER CHOSEN BY MR. BARBER TO BE READ AT HIS FUNERAL
We seem to give him back to Thee dear Lord
who gavest him to us. Yet as Thou didst not
lose him in giving, so we have not lost him
by his return. Not as the world givest,
givest Thou, O Lover of Souls. For what is
Thine is ours always if we are Thine. What
Thou givest Thou does not take away. And
life is eternal and love is immortal, and death
is only a horizon, and horizon is nothing
save the limit of one’s sight. Lift us up,
O God, that we may see further; cleanse
our eyes that we may see more clearly; draw
us closer to Thyself, that we may know
ourselves closer to our beloved who are with
Thee; and grant that where they are, and Thou
art, we too may one day be. Through Jesus
Christ, our Lord, Amen.
The Rev. Thomas D. Bowers
Page 510 “Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music” by Barbara B Heyman

"And life is eternal and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon, and horizon is nothing save the limit of one’s sight."
Again, I reiterate, we are not an ant farm. We are not a socialist or c*******t tribe of the stone age.

Nickolai

If the Jews were nomads how in the world did they become literate ? Cuneiform, Gilgamesh and the Story of a great flood date to ancient Sumer in Present day Iraq and the city of Uruk 3,500-3,000 BCE Jews had no knowledge of a written language until around 900 BCE and then not by the ordinary person but the ruling elite only Millions of years of separate evolution has, of course, resulted in considerable divergence in all manner of traits. Questions about what separates us from other animals also carry some unfortunate baggage. One by one, all claims to human uniqueness have similarly fallen aside. For example, in 1960 Jane Goodall, refuted the idea that human tool use set us apart from our closest relatives. Perhaps the entire enterprise of looking for traits that distinguish us from other apes is misguided and the differences are more quantitative than qualitative?

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

Nik, the first book of the Bible, Genesis, was written between 1450 and 1400 BC, and over the course of the next thousand years, 38 books that make up the OT were written, the last book of the OT, Malachi, was written in 400 BC. There is no evidence whatsoever pointing to 650 BC as the year the OT was written. That idea is preposterous, patently absurd.

Is the original Bible still in existence? Best read this, Nik, the least it will do is help you stop making a fool of yourself regarding all matters pertaining to an entire universe of human beliefs that you have totally rejected.

Every religion has dogma, Nik, atheism is a religion, it has dogma. Wh**ever drives you to unbelief is dogmatic.

Nickolai

Atheism is not a religion It has no texts no congregation no preachers no gathering place no tithing no dogma just unbelief.

Traditionally, both Jews and Christians accepted that the five books of the Pentateuch were the work of Moses at the time of the Exodus, c.1440 BCE. The problems with this have long been recognized - notably there is the question of how Moses could describe the events of Genesis, which he had not witnessed. Various suggestions were put forward, including direct revelation by God or, alternatively, the idea that the various Patriarchs, beginning with Adam, had kept records which they had passed on. By the 19th century, however, these explanations no longer seemed convincing to biblical scholars, and in its place the idea of the documentary hypothesis gained wide acceptance. This proposed that four separate narrative histories of Israel's origins had been composed between the time of David (9th century BC) and the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians (6th century BC), and subsequently combined around 450 BC. This hypothesis enjoyed wide support for much of the 20th century, but since around 1970 it came under increasing scrutiny and today, while it still has defenders, it no longer enjoys the status it once had. Currently, there is little consensus on the issue of authorship. Liberal scholars tend to hold that the book had many authors and was a product of the Exilic and Persian periods (6th and 5th centuries BCE

Blade_Runner Loc: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

The hell it doesn't have preachers and a congregation. Hawkins, Dawkins, Hitchens, Darwin, Marx, do these names ring a bell? They're preachers, man, they preach secular humanistic doctrines, and they have lots of followers. And, books? How about the books? Atheist scripture? The Atheist Bible maybe? The God Delusion? Or, how about On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Se******n. Quote us some verses from any of those babies.

CounterRevolutionary

Historically, I would disagree with you on Noah/Gilgamesh since those ruins at Ebla go back 8,000 years. Writing on clay tablets in cuneiform was quite prevalent back then, not only for family history and tribal history, but for business, using two separate numerical systems, one based on 10, the other on 60 (or 12s, to coincide with time). These clay tablets exist today at Ebla and Carchemish. The discovery of the town of Ebla goes back to the late 1980s, Carchemish nearly a century earlier.

The Jews were to stage the first revolt against human s***ery, EXODUS, expressing the sovereignty of the individual over that of the State, man created by God in his image, hence all men were equal in the eyes of their Creator. How radical is that? 75% of the world was under s***ery during Christ's times. And then there were those Jews who owned their own land, homes, as free men. Read Leviticus.

Caesar feared Christ, the Jewish Savior, not as God, but as a military revolutionary. With over 500 witnesses to his resurrection after the crucifixion, the Romans were indeed on panic mode. Maccabees and Masada are not part of the KJV Bible, so we forget the fuller picture of history.

Iliamna1

At this point, I believe Nikki will only believe when he can put his hands in the scars on Christ's hands and feet, and is forced by an angel to his knees and made to confess that Jesus IS Lord . . . only then. For now, he has the prophets, the witness of the disciples, the Bible, the writings of various atheists and his p***e. We make our choices.
"If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve. . . As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Josh 24:15

4430 Loc: Little Egypt ** Southern Illinory

Ya gotta remember ole Nicky says there is no God but continues to talk about it like he's an expert on anything that has to do with the Scriptures !

He's just trying to make himself look smart but turns out he's just the opposite !