No Answers In Genesis

[bill_sheehan]

I like to chat with evangelists. I usually learn something, they might learn something, and we both get to sharpen our wits a bit in parrying each other’s arguments. I’ve had online conversations that have gone on for weeks

Comments

[skull_bearer]

*eyes roll out of sockets* Whaaa...

I would say however that a better retort to 'the Bible says' would be 'The Iliad says' admittedly that assume they have heard of Homer beyond the Simpsons, but it'll hold more weigth because one of their main retorts is that the Bible is very old. Hah! My book is even older!

[bill_sheehan]

And we know that the Iliad is true, because there's unshakable archeological evidence that Troy existed!

[blesserbeing]

A better retort would probably be the 25,000 manuscripts of the bible compared to the 643 manuscripts of the Iliad.

Everything we were talking about before

[blesserbeing]

Sorry I have failed to message back until recently, I was in Mexico for about five days and I just got back today. Before that I kind of just forgot to check up on our chat. Anyway, I realize we were continually broadening the discussion in the chat on wolfpurplemoon's wall (with smaller margins each time), so let's try to narrow it down to some basics

Re: Everything we were talking about before

[bill_sheehan]

Hi Brennen, good to see you again. I'm just back from a long road trip myself

[liddle_oldman]

Did I explain my theory about the Old Testament?

As you say, it was written (partly) to account for a Universe less then a thousand miles across -- pretty much as far as you could ride in a trade caravan. (And not the Silk Road, either.) But then the margins got bigger, and entire continents got added, and several planets, and then the heliocentric realization, and then an entire Galaxy -- and then trillions of them. And this myth, written about a couple of valleys east of the Mediterranean and a God who would walk in a garden in the cool of the morning -- because it would get hot later -- had to eventually stretch from a fe hundred miles to about thirty billion light years.

The Bible has mission creep.

(As for B.E. Smith's questions, below, the Gospels were written long after anyone who'd ever met the historic Jesus had died. The Gospels, looking at the possibility of veracity and ignoring everything else, are like trying to write a biography of Lincoln by talking to Republicans. It might sound good on the surface...)

[bill_sheehan]

Mission creep. I love it.

I wonder what Republican hagiographers would have done with Lincoln's creation of income tax...