Re: Lenny hits a home run: Re: What Jesus Really Say



Robert Carnegie wrote:
VoiceOfReason wrote:
On Mar 8, 5:16 am, "[M]adman" <g...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
'Rev Dr' Lenny Flank wrote:

<...>

Fundies of all sorts seem to like this sort of story -- "my preferred
ancient text tells all sorts of things that ancient people couldn't
have known, therefore my preferred ancient text MUST have been written
by god".  Whether it's Spin braying about how God must have told
Israel that burying your *** helps keep people from getting sick, or
our Muslim friend here braying that Allah must have told people what
an embryo looks like.

It assumes that ancient people were stupid.

They weren't.  They had the very same brains that WE do, and the same
power of observation.

In all of these lists of "miraculous knowledge" that I have seen, from
both Muslims and Christians, I have not seen anything -- anything at
all -- that could not have been figured out by any reasonably-educated
Bronze or Iron Age person with good powers of observation and some
simple equipment.

Heck, the ancient Greeks not only knew that the earth was round, but
knew how big it was (to within ten percent of the correct figure - an
error that resulted from their rather crude method of measuring long
distances, rather than from the logical process they used to calculate
the earth's size).  And they didn't get that "miraculous knowledge"
from any god or gods.

If these ancient people were so smart why do you (and many others) ignore
what they have written down for posterity as if it had no value?

Obviously they aren't ignored, as Lenny demonstrated above. Much of
what was learned in ancient Greece evolved into current-day science.
Of course, that doesn't include myths about Zeus.

On the one hand you are saying they were smart and had strong powers of
observation. And i agree.

But on the other hand you ridicule everything they wrote down as not having
any merit what-so-ever.

Quite contradictory.

The observation that the ancient Greeks knew the shape and size of the
earth is hardly ridicule.

Since so much is written down by these people with "strong powers of
observation" regarding God, what makes you think they are lying about there
being a God that created the world?

Gods cannot be observed. Do you take Greek mythology literally? Do
you believe in the panoply of Greek gods?

Jumping in, I'm not aware of a lot of personal testimony about their
actual existence. However, I still think that a dogmatic view that
"Gods cannot be observed" is prettymuch equivalent to atheism ...

Not at all. To many people, seeking "proof" for God's existence is
the antithesis of faith. To some Christians, searching for such
evidence flies in the face of the lesson taught in the "doubting
Thomas" story.


... - if you
believe that the universe guarantees never to have gods show up on you
- and, now that I think of it, meaningless. If I say that dark matter
cannot be observed then... perhaps "detected" is a better word.

Gods cannot be observed? The Greek pantheon (note the word) mostly
left illegitimate children all over the ancient world, according to
the stories. A lot of people evidently were observing the gods very
closely.

Of course, I was thinking mainly of Christianity, so mentioning the
Greek gods was probably not the best example. But you can't observe
Greek gods today, can you? (Apart from the obvious jokes...)


And of course you have to dispose of cases such as (hypothetical)
belief that the sun is a god. The sun can be observed, obviously.
But don't look straight at it, even with the unaided eye, obviously
not with binoculars or telescope or something. Apparently there is a
similar problem with Jehovah, so in that case and in that sense you
would be right.

.

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