Re: Ancient Texts

unrestrained_hand@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 6, 8:32 pm, "[M]adman" <g...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
unrestrained_h...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

<snip>


Much of these are truths presented fictionally. Shakespeare was a
brilliant master of presenting truth with irony and entertainment.
It is all about how many levels you are capable of understanding
the material in. If one can only differentiate between fact and
fiction, then that leaves a lot of levels of understanding out of
the mix. IMHO, it basically makes them retarded if they are only
able to percieve information (and therefore the world) in such a
limited 2 dimentional way.

What should we make of someone who believes his interpretation of a
myth explains the material world? Or the one who thinks that age
should be venerated to such an extent that old claims cannot be
questioned?

I'm not sure i follow you here..

Ahem. Too oblique? Sorry.

I was talking about you in particular.
You think certain ancient texts are utterly reliable.

utterly? no for the most part? yes

You think they give correct explanations of the natural world.

In an overall way. Yes.

You believe your interpretations are infallible.

Some of it. yes

You think that being refuted in particular issues by verifiable facts

You cannot verify the supernatural with natural science, remember?

is insufficient to surrender your attachment to your ideas.

Whn you pony up some proof that you KNOW will not change with tommorows new
cast i will.

You think that age alone gives a book more veracity.

Alone? No. Age is not the sole deciding factor. But is sure makes up the
larger percentage of consideration


These are all errors on your part.
<snip>


Because you say so .. right?

Get real.



Why do you blend your books on myth with her books on actual
history in this sentence? Was there a comparison here in your mind?

When I said above - "Hmmm. Sun Tsu's Art of War. Native American
myths and rituals. The Greeks (well, some of them). " It was fresh
on my mind, I wouldn't expect it to be so in yours. American Indian
myths would naturally be part of any study of their culture and
history. She is currently living in the Navajo reservations, taking
classes in Native American history, Native American literature,
Navajo culture, and the Navajo language. "Native American" of
course, covers a lot of ground. One may as well say that someone is
studying "European culture in a year's worth of classes. She is
heading for a major in anthropology - intending to do anthro
documentaries, I believe.

That sounds /great/ K.

I hope she does well. And...It sounds fascinating.


Thank you.
<snip>


Some would say that there is no evidence for fulfilled bible
prophecies. They were written after the fact, after all. And many of
them are of the newspaper horoscope variety - that is they can apply
to so many situations that they are almost useless. And if the
history of Jesus has *any bearing to reality (it's not clear that
it does), then he may has made certain decisions based solely on
prophecy, in order to fulfill them.

Remember, the only evidence a skeptic has that the bible is special
is ...the bible. Forgive this skeptic from doubting its usefulness
in this regard.

Nothing wrong with being skeptical. It is a good way to protect
yourself. But I try not to go over board with it and allow
skepticism to cloud my better judgment.

Being skeptical does not mean being a curmugeon who accepts nothing as
true, and worse, nothing as valuable.

It means knowing the difference between contingent truth and absolute
truth; it means recognizing the spectrum of "as certain as reality can
be" to "likely" to "possible but uncertain" to "very unlikely" to
"when monkeys fly out of by backside".

I do not think you have a firm grasp on exactly what "contingent truth" is.

Much of your science that you know will eventually revise as new evidences
are found is contingent truth.

Only you believe it as absolute truth.

Yet everything that i have discovered about God has remained the same for
thousands of years.

There is your real "absolute truth".

You live in a fog while thinking you can see clearly with man made facts.





I have found too many instances where the bible is correct. That is a
personal observation based on years of various reading and not based
on a few casual books. You have to make up your own mind. In order
to do that properly, you gave to do your own comparisons.

I did. And except where it recited platitudes and mundane life, the
history seemed to conflict with the evidence and the miracles were in
contrast to common sense and evidence both. I find the moral codes
reprehensible, and the only persuasive arguments for it (or any of the
Western religions) to be purely emotional. Of course, I was raised a
biblical literalist.

There are ways to follow religious paths - even Christianity or Islam
- without all of that, but using it as a guide to the workings of the
material world is an egregious error.

If there were a global flood, then the universe is a farce, an
illusion. If the creator god (or so he is said to claim) is a
trickster, then nothing can be trusted. Not the scriptures, not one's
own reason, not the evidence of one's eyes. Like most theists, I think
the world is trustworthy; that is, it is not all one big joke, nor a
cruel hoax.

You do not get it do you?

EVERYTHING that you see and think you can measure on this planet and in this
universe IS an illusion.

And a good one too. You are here to make a choice under difficult
circumstancs.

Think about it. Please.







Doubly so when your interpretation is used as evidence that
verifiable facts are unreliable, or a tested model (theory) should
be discarded in favor of a model which is contradicted by the
evidence.

Some things are beyond perceived evidence.

Yes; it's called the imagination. One with facts but no imagination is
dull. But one with imagination and no facts is lost.

How can you be so sure your evidences are real Kermit.

Man's perception is too faulty to think he is discovering anything real. Or
Set in stone.

Next time you are driving, look out side your window. Everything appears to
be moving. Change perspectives and it becomes clear that it is you that is
moving.

You, and science in paticular, can only measure and understand what can be
percieved from our current perspective.



Enough so to convince me based on historical comparisons.

Only one example is the Book of Daniel. One of Two books that Jesus
Quotes from. So this tells us the book is pre-Jesus plus the events
Daniel writes about have been verified by Babylonian texts as well.
So we got accurate dates.

Too many questionable steps between the source of this and the
evidence at hand.

The same principal could be said for evolution.

This is why science only accepts data that others can verify.
This is why models which do not make predictions are not considered
explanations.

I guess that blows evolution down the drain then.



Too much time between the sourse and the claimed divergence.

Too much evidence for your comfort level, which is why you always
reject the data. It's there, including evolution in real time.

It is you that utterly refuses to let go of the tangable.



Daniel is a young teenager brought to Babylon,

Even this mundane event - a young man coming to the Empire's center
- has no corroborating evidence.

The Prayer of Nabonidus. Nabonidus is Nebuchadnezzar.

This prayer (written in Babylon) gives independent corroboration to
the book of Daniel.

Books written after the fact Do. Not. Corroborate. Prophecies.



http://www.scribd.com/doc/503516/OT3-Daniel-Date-Historicity





which at that time was a
spectacular city. It would be like bringing a teen from the back
woods of Alabama and dumping him in New York. Daniel asks God for
revelations, and God sends him Gabriel. Gabriel explains what
things will be like in the last days. He says that people will be
going to and from and knowledge will explode. We see that today.
Consider the exponential population explosion of the last century,
and all of the amazing increase in technology, information,
communication, transportation.

Then in the book of Revelation it is said that two witnesses will
lay dead in the streets of the city of david and that for 2 1/2
days all nations on earth will view them. This was not possible
before satellite television.

Have you reviewed the 2000 years of interpretations of
these ...visions?

This particular event has not happened yet. The point is no one has
fully understood what the book of REV was discussing regarding the 2
witnesses being dead in the street while all nations on earth view
the bodies. That is until the onslaught of world wide satellite
television. Now the statements make sense. We now know that it will
be possible for every nation on earth to view two dead bodies in the
streets of Jerusalem at the same time. And as we all know, the news
will play it over and over for days. So the prediction is set up to
be possible while part of the revelation has come true with world
wide satellite television. We can now witness the event if it
happens.

What I mean is, for 2000 years people have been claiming that they
understand the revelations and their meanings. Their explanations have
been different, and have fallen. For a real time example, see
Elijovah's prediction that we will all die and see that he was right
after all, come April - just a few weeks now.

You're just another one of many that projects his own personal
experiences and needs onto the Rorschach inkblot of the bible. Altho
of course any scriptures, fairy tale, oral tradition, or tea leaves
would do.


I hardly call the invention of satellite television my very own prophesy

The sentences now make sense where they did not make sense in the past.

Here:

"7Now when they have finished their testimony, the beast that comes up from
the Abyss will attack them, and overpower and kill them. 8Their bodies will
lie in the street of the great city, which is figuratively called Sodom and
Egypt, where also their Lord was crucified.

9 _For three and a half days men from every people, tribe, language and
nation will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial_ 10The inhabitants
of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other
gifts, because these two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.
Now. Can you understand why it is possible for "every people, tribe,
language and nation will gaze on their bodies" ?

Satellite television.




Jesus says when the fig tree (metaphor for Israel) begins to
blossom you know that spring is near. And Israel reformed as a
state again in 1948.

You think the fig tree means Israel, so therefore radioisotope
dating is unreliable?

Calling Isreal "the fig tree" is quite a common and well known term.

Yes, and the eagle was Rome until it was the US, Or were there a few
countries and empires in between?

The fig tree has pretty much been isreal alone


And yes, your dating methods can be unreliable. Why deny it. It is
often smoke and mirrors while they know the approximate date before
the test often.

No, they are accurate within a known range of time and degree of
error. Just like a ruler. If I use a tape measure to mark a board for
cutting with a hand saw, it might be a millimeter off, or several, or
more if I'm careless. But if I'm careful and say that it's marked at
three feet, and you check it out, and Billy Bob checks it out, and we
all agree that it's marked at three feet, we might be off by a eighth
of an inch or so, but it's *not a wild-assed number that's randomly
plucked from the aether, that might be six feet, or twenty - who
knows?

You are talking to a bunch of carpenters and saying that we have no
*idea* how far the mark is from the end, maybe it's a tiny bit off, we
know that, but it's close, and you're saying that we're crazy, it
might actually be fifty feet, and we're standing there looking at an
eight-foot board with a pencil mark on it... and well, you look pretty
foolish.

That's what you look like when you tell geologists and biologists that
they don't know what they're talking about.

The only ones that are foolish are the ones that think mankind can accuratly
date ANYTHING beyond 15 or so thousands of years.





Must we beat this dead horse?

Why? Do you think that reality will change because you're bored with
the responses? If you keep saying the same wrong thing, you're going
to get the same correction, more or less. How else would it work?

*You're the one coming here and saying we don't know what we're
talking about, see? You're the one telling the carpenters they don't
understand the tape measure. Some of them are going to walk off in
exasperation, some of them will call you names, because they've
corrected you several times already, and some will sit down once more
and try to explain it all to you.

Science doesn't just *feel right to us. It accomplishes things. It
wiped out smallpox, and cut way back on infections in hospitals.
Science just sent a woman home after giving her a new face. Do you
think that this is all a lucky guess? You can't just put stuff
together at random and have it work. Hubble space telescope! The
computer you're reading this on! It's all one science. You can't pick
and choose which conclusions you like and say the other sciences
aren't any good.

It sounds like you are trying to convince yourself. Not me.

1) your dating methods will be improved upon should man live beyond the end
of this century.

2) Evolution will be re written when a new discovery is made.

THAT is a phrophsey.


<snip>


So you ask "What makes you think you are not deluding yourself"?
I'm not. I have been carefully connecting the dots between this
information and that information to get an accurate idea of what
happened back then. Some of it is frightening if it is true. I also
compare language and words. When something cannot be connected, it
can generally be considered an embellishment, or false. So I
suppose I may be using a type of scientific method. I am not just
taking what I read as 100% truth until I read it somewhere else
and the important facts line up.

Please look up pareidolia.

Does not apply.

You are looking at a closed world of poetry, fantasy, best guesses,
and vague correlations independent of the "material" world. It is all
taped together with your own interpretations, and you must dutifully
reject external reality, the evidence of your senses, because your
have put so much work into this personal mythology, and it makes sense
to you, but it can't be real unless the world is an illusion.

Ever hear of 'suspension of disbelief'?

That is what apply here when reading poetry, etc...





And what would be "different about the world"? should I discover
truth or be found wrong? Nothing.

The train is in motion and not much will stop it until the end of
time as we know it. All we can do is live by our inner light and
hope for the best because no one really has all the answers. This
is the point where I walk by faith and not by sight. You have
chosen to be more comfortable to walk by sight. The sight of
science. Whereas I can perceive something beyond science, beyond
our time constraints.

Idols are not always carved in literal stone. Sometimes they are
ideas that we are so attached to that we will deny all else to
maintain them.

Ask yourself this. Which ideas are easier to believe and therefore
easier to attach to? Those such as you believe in? The ideas that
can be touched, added up, compared and tested. Or those ideas
regarding God.

I admit; I'm attached to reality. I tried living in my own fantasy
world, and not only did reality keep getting in my face, but it was
ultimately much more interesting than my own internal world. The
universe is bigger than I; I can never exhaust it.

You are not supose to exhaust it.

All of this... everything you can see and touch has been giving to us to
occupy time.

Time that had a begining. And will have an end. But you will continue to
exist.




Parables and mythologies are so like Rorschach ink blots, that the
fantasies we weave around them can be internally consistent. Why
not? They are all written by the same author. But if you discipline
yourself to compare ideas against reality, then you can be sure that
it is not yourself you worship.

discipline yourself? Would that be along the lines of "convince
yourself? Self brain washing?

Strange that you would think of comparing ideas to reality to be part
of a brainwashing process.

Actually i was comparing your method

IOW if you have to "discipline yourself" to understand and accept ideas in
relation to what you perceive as reality, then maybe you were on the right
track in the first place. Because it was a more instinctive response before
the "discipline" process


You think you are safe from error because you lock yourself away from
the world?

Quite the contrary. I am safe from (some) error because I see the inner
workings of this world. The ones most have trouble these days percieving.
The bible puts it as learning to recognize "rhythms" of the earth, grace,
stuff like that.


Hell, just in this newsgroup I can depend on these people to call me
out if I say anything idiotic. If I were a scientist I would have
*lots of people looking for me to make a mistake.

No guts no glory , eh?




I think you look for any (and all) man made excuses to turn from your
creator.

The thought occurs to me that you worship not God, but your own idea
of God; that you are so attached to your own cleverness that you are
afraid to test it against the ground beneath your feet. I fear, that
like so many others, you will simply spend your whole life in self-
deception.

God has never spoken to me, but thousands of *people have, all
claiming to tell me what God wants, and what he is like. All of them,
apparently, are different gods.

There is only one true God


The garden speaks does to me, as does my wooden dummy and heavy bag.
(My cat, too.)

Fossils speak to me. altho not as eloquently as to a paleontologist.

You would rather old bones talk to you then God?



Think of a scale numbered 1 to 10 .

with this particular reality being 5

Given a choice, would you like to stay at number 5?

Given this reality or wallowing in self-deception? Reality.

Son, declaring your imagination to be reality number 10, good stuff,
A- OK, doesn't make it so.




Seems that you do. Of course. It is safe at number 5.

Safe? Ever have knife fights outside your door? Ever have cars explode
on the street corner? Ever see the husband and wife across the street
fighting? With an axe?

I live in a Beaver Cleaver's home town now, but I know that can change
in a moment. No, there is temporary comfort in this world, but there
is never safety.

I meant "safe" emotionally regarding God. Staying at number 5 you never have
to look for Him, you can be content with your knife fights cars exploding
and axes.



I choose to find number 10 with that simple leap of faith that goes
beyond physical science..

Yes, You just make stuff up. You're not alone, altho - as to be
expected - you all make *different stuff up.

No. You just do not understand faith ---and ---

you cannot tell the difference between someone making stuff up and someone
trying to hold a real discussion with you about a topic that you have no
ability to understand it seems.

You have a very low empthey level or you simply lack any perception for
anything beyond what you can hold in your hand.

There's a reason why scientists agree on nearly everything.

Yeah. Job security and grant money



Kermit

.

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