guest301 said:
White Savage..No scientific fact has ever disproved the bible in anyway. Read Job 26:7 where we read a modern description of the earth as it spins in empty space. Isaiah 40:22 states that God sits upon "the circle of the earth" How did the writers know that the world wasn't flat?
How did the ancient Greeks know the world isn't flat and revolving? (Assuming the Ancient Israelites didn't think the world was a DISK with their circle...it all hinges on whether the actual translation is "circle" of "sphere"...but I digress.) Come to think of it, how did Democritus know that matter was made of atoms? (He originated the term and everything.) Obviously God was whispering in their ear...or not.
OTOH, why did the Ancient Israelites think Pi was 3, instead of the Greek's more accurate 22/7? You'd think if God was really explaining abstract crap to them about astronomy and the hydrologic cycle, he'd tell them something they could really use. And why not something that would ABSOLUTELY prove Divine Authorship in clear language? "Mars is red and made of rust", "Time slows with velocity", "This is how you build an airplane." Instead we get vague allusions that are hardly unique.
I've read the prophecies you speak of. First of all, there is no proof that any of them were actually written down beforehand. More importantly, when Daniel tells Babylon, the country that took the Jews into bondage, that they are going to be destroyed, this seems like exactly what a firebrand spiritual leader would say. Was Churchill a Nostradamus for predicting that England would win in the darkest days of WWII? Considering how violent and shifting the balance of power was in the Ancient Middle East was, predicting a given empire would fall is always a safe bet.
Psalm 22 proves little, except that the persons who wrote the New Testament were familiar with Psalm 22 (which of course they would be) and put some of the phraseology in Jesus' mouth. There is no way to independently verify what prophecies Jesus furfilled, or even independent verification that he actually existed, though I'll grant you the latter as a "probably".
Talk to an Orthodox Jewish scholar sometime. (I have one for a pen pal, believe it or not.) They obviously DON'T believe that Messianic prophecy has been furfilled and can give you all sorts of reasons why.
It's been, what, a month since I posted the full text of Matthew and Luke's completely different geneologies for Christ, and still no brave Christian has attempted to offer an appologia for it. That direct and undeniable example of a Biblical internal contradiction is alot more compelling than a few prophetic furfillments that may or may not have happened, IMO.
Lack "Spiritual Wisdom" do I? What a nice term, impossible to quantify or test, unlike I.Q. or knowledge. But obviously I DO have a sense of the spiritual, since I am not an atheist and argue against atheism. It's just that Christianity, the religion I grew up immersed in, is, upon deep reflection, repugnant to my soul (I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, but thats what I feel) and doesn't speak to me...at all. So reason doesn't lead me to Christianity and emotion doesn't lead me to Christianity either, so either there is something fundamentally wrong with my soul or Christianity isn't the religion for everybody.
Nor can I be accused of seeing everything "through the prism of race" since for most of life I wasn't a racialist, since most of my ideas predate my racialism, and since, being at heart something of a libertarian/liberal/freethinker, I come to racialism reluctantly. (FACT: One of my favorite movies was, and still is on some level, "In the Heat of the Night" with Sidney Poitier. Alas, if all, most, or even a good number of black males was really like Mr. Tibbs, I wouldn't be on this board. But that movie image was basically a lie.) I'd like everyone to be basically simular and equal on average, you have to believe me on that one. The world would be nicer. But its not. If I want to view the world accurately, the mass of evidence indicates I have to take deep-seated ethnic difference seriously. And if I want to preserve the cultural and societal conditions I cherish, then I can't afford to be all luvey-liberal with people who have certain "differences" either.
