I don't see why we have to have these debates. It did not literally, historically happen. Conundrum solved. It's a story that can still have religious, ethical, spiritual meaning. Aesop's Fables didn't literally happen either, they are still meaningful stories.
Even like Maus did not literally happen as written (the holocaust did happen, to be clear, but it happened to humans), the point is a level of abstraction to get at deeper truths.
Some people think everything literally happened but some people think they are literally married to Severus Snape. Nobody's getting through to those people, least of all with a Lemmy comment or a cartoon. Don't worry about them.
Because the Mythicism debate is important to have.
Scenario 1: there was a street preacher illiterate magician who operated for about six months and one day got an idea to attack Rome and Rome didn't care for that. The result was the world's first and second biggest religion.
Scenario 2: Paul took the James con and spent about 40 years working on it. Improving it. Make sure it brought in the crowds. The result was very interesting stories that involved the whole family in an experience and it was that that ended up taking over the world.
Frankly the first scenario is pretty scary. That crazy guy with the cardboard sign saying the end is near? All it takes is him to get shot by the cops and civilization will be in ruins 300 years later. I am much more inclined to believe that the entire practice of baptism, communion, singing together, waiting for Holy Spirit to speak through you, demon casting out and the plot skeleton of Mark came from a determined guy who ruthlessly not only stole from the best but was willing to be a workaholic with his material.
So yeah it does matter. All humans on earth are shaped by these events. If we are such that a person with no original ideas can still win we are in a lot more danger than if we lost to a person who had a new idea every Sunday.
Even if the biblical Jesus was a real guy who said literally everything ascribed to him he would have still been hundreds of years behind the thinking of the Empire.
There are 100000 of these happening every year. Every kind of outlet is working on squeezing the fuck out of events like that. You can drop a pin on the ground and the news will try to make the world out of it. Constantly trying to jumpstart some bullshit.
Jesus and "his followers" are more akin to an early psychedelic/hippie movement with all the ideas that came with it. They were in a way the pioneers of society, the one that eventually brought an order of higher level equality.
Just remember, most western atheists were Christians for a long time first. They ain't outsiders talking about a faith they don't understand, they are people of the same culture criticizing that culture.
In short, they own the Bible just as much as you do.
I kinda hate these types of comics. There really isn't any reason why this should be a comic other than the writer's medium of choice. The message gains nothing from the visual aspect. The comic could really have been improved if the author showed what the characters are talking about, but we just get a wall of text with a crudely drawn woman to represent the opposition. Also, the art has no appeal and is generally ugly.
The ark story doesn't necessarily mean that all of sea level rise was result of rainfall.
Domino collapse of glaciers have been known to raise sea levels extremely quickly.
There was even a theory by a palentologist (which I cant currently find) of an ice dam left over from an ice age which separated two major parts of the ocean, which had different sea levels. When the ice dam eventually collapsed, the oceans would have reached equilibrium in a matter of days. Given the chaotic history of plate tectonics and ice ages, this isnt an unreasonable theory. Imagine if the mouth of the Mediterranean was frozen over, and the body evaporated down to lower levels, and people settled there. Then the ice wall collapsed.
Im not saying any of this explains a ridiculous bible story, just that, as a scientist, its short-sighted to assume rainfall was the only possible contributor to the flood.
There's another, funner, theory, whereby a feedback loop in tectonic movement makes the plate boundaries heat up and the plates move ever faster (for a while till it calms down again). The ocean floor thereby becomes hot and more buoyant on the mantle beneath - so ocean floor rises and continents sink.
That theory is backed up by some proper plate simulation by a respected scientist, but as far as I know it was never developed past the initial simulation work and intriguing result.
There was a flood after the meditteran salinity crysis, which happened partly due to lowered pressure in the nord causing the ground in the south to recede after the ice was gone (think of pressing in a balloon). There was a theory that the black sea flood (was half as big prior) due to this was what we know as the great flood, with humanity living mostly around there at the time, but i think it was refuted, because the flooding happened over generations there.
The thing with glacier seas happened mostly in scandinavia, gb, up there, creating the english channel (the heck? German it is Ärmelkanal).
"The world" back then also was something like a town and its surrounding villages. It probably just rained really heavy for a few days, flooded some village in a way that never happened before and the only explanation was "God's wrath".
I believe most of religious stories can be explained by people talking shit.
We also don't talk about the fact that the only humans that were saved was a family. Who repopulated the earth.
Like, with Adam and Eve and their offspring, the implication is that they inbred because literally no other humans existed. Still pretty gross, but the second time it happened was just abject laziness on God's part. Like your omnipotent ass couldn't have at the very least picked a few more families.
He just delegated that to Noah. But Noah doesn't quite have the same air of authority as fucking God, so of course nobody believed him until it started flooding. Even if it wasn't God who told him about it, like maybe he was just really good at predicting the weather or something, I could see the same thing happening.
I think I figured the math on the assumption that Noah's kids brought significant others with and it was technically possible to avoid parent-child pairings so long as each unrelated male female combination was utilized, which is to say they screwed each others wives in addition to their own. Not like the bible gives a fuck about parent child incest babies, that was Lot's whole character arc.
The animals, on the other hand, those are all shit out of luck.
Slight disagreement. With Adam and Eve it is implied that there were other people about. Which is why Cain complains that if he is cast out someone will murder him. And why it isn't clear who the males are mating with.
The current understanding is that this was the origin story for those people and they thought pretty much every tribe around them had their own god with their own origin story. Later on retrocons left plot problems.
One morereason to like the fact France dont have any lesson on religion in its schools. (But let's be honest, there is also a aweful lot to dislike in our schools.)
Kids should be taught about religion, because religion is an important part of society.
Notice I said taught about, not taught. They shouldn't be taught that any religion is true, just that "Here's a popular religion, and here's what these people believe."
Good teachers do it, both in history and french class, but that’s often an overlooked part of the teaching plan. In part because our government ask teachers to teach more and more things a year, and no days are added to said year. (The teaching about religion, I mean. Teaching religion is still illegal in public schools, and must be optional in privates ones.)
Also, the "peoples" who govern us might prefer us ignorant of those things. (And many other, to be honest.)
Fun fact: all of the oldest recorded stories - in addition to the Torah there's the Sumerian writings that are even older - have a story of a worldwide flood event.
The caveat being that to them, the "world" that was flooded was the Mesopotamian basin area. In the millennia since then, the known world has grown to encompass the entire planet, so the context informing our interpretation has shifted, and we need to expend proper effort to shift it back, to what they would have meant back then, not what it would mean to us today if similar words had been used, e.g. if the story were told in English.
The children's story myth seems to have arisen from an irl event, just not the one that the picture books repeatedly show & tell (obviously for reasons of profit, they sell what people will buy and enjoy looking at, rather than focusing on historical accuracy).
Floods happen, sometimes big floods happen, humans tend to live near water, so when big floods happen lots of humans die. The stories grow by being retold, eventually you get the mother of all floods stories.
I don't have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific. We have secular history and from there we can know what really happened. Now, the Bible is consistent on very little, homophobia is one of those things it is consistent on. The solution is not to be an apologist for the text. The solution is throw out that bronze age crap and be nice to the LGBT.
I did this crap when I was working my way out of religion and no one has to make the same mistakes I did. It wasn't really slavery, it wasn't really racism, it wasn't really genocide, it wasn't really homophobia, it wasn't really oppression...rip the band-aid off! It was slavery, it was racism, it was homophobia, it was brutal oppression.
I have debated with you before, and you were using Ehrman-level arguments to try and gymnastic your thoughts into believing that the Gospels were somehow not written by who they are attributed to. According to you, apologetics come to violence. On this platform I have seen people literally call for the wiping out of Christians, one even advocated wiping out all Christians, Jews and Muslims (that's 4 billion people). If you want to use mental gymnastics to try and convince yourself that the Bible is somehow not real so you don't have to worry about facing God, I won't stop you. But it doesn't make it any less real.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Jesus definitely existed, there are historical records of him and his crucifixion. The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable (by others, I don’t believe in space wizards except Jedi) but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
What’s super gross is you’re othering them based on their religion.
Better tell these losers. Not a single one noticed his existence until after the Mark Gospel was written and widely published. Not a single shred of contemporary evidence, an inconsistent biography, a story that even removed supernatural events stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
there are historical records of him and his crucifixion.
Very well show me the contemporary record.
The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Which makes it even worse. They were good at it and yet the records for Jesus aren't there. The first Roman official that even mentions the Christians was after they had been around for decades and he doesn't even seem to know what rank Pilot had.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
Yes sixty years isnt contemporary. I am not a contemporary of LBJ or Dr. King or Malcom X, I am not wearing tight bellbottom jeans or worrying about the Soviet Union nuking me. I am not mourning JFK. Nor am I protesting US military action against Charlie by burning my draft card.
Noticed how even people in the area at the time didn't see anything? I gave you a chart did you even bother looking at it?
Hannibal didn’t exist either, I guess.
Misdirection, stay on topic. Why can't you prove that your zombie was real?
I don’t believe in the resurrection nor do I believe in any of this except for the idea that people ought to be allowed their own beliefs AND your language of othering that dude is fucking gross.
You can pat yourself on the back, you’ve won the argument you think you’re having with me the same way a skunk does.
Tolerance isn't the same thing as acceptance. I tolerate religious beliefs, I don't accept them without evidence. Just because I believe it should be legal for people to believe in 20 century old con by James and Paul about a made up figure doesn't mean I accept it as true and don't call it out.
Sorry the evidence didnt back up your claims today.
See, you aren't really interested in any intellectual argument. It's a heart issue. You think you know better than God and want to be your own God. Hence the deconversion.
Thallus (b. 52AD) might have wrote about a darkness and earthquake happening when Jesus was crucified.
Pliny the Younger (b. 61AD) testified to Jesus and talked how His followers thought He is God, and how they worshipped Him.
Phlegon (b. 80AD) likely confirmed the darkness and Jesus predicting the fall of the temple, also confirmed the crucifixion and resurrection
Celsus (b. 175AD) confirmed Jesus had powers and that He was believed to be born of a virgin
Flavius Josephus (b. 37ad) confirmed He existed also and was reportedly resurrected.
The Jewish Talmud confirmed Jesus existed and was crucified, although came 400 years after the fact.
Then there's the entire Isaiah 53 prophecy we have from 700 years before Christ, the earliest copy being from 100 years before.
Who has believed what he has heard from us?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,
because he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and makes intercession for the transgressors.
Then of course you have the New Testament on top of that.
This is more evidence than we have for other historical figures from around that time. Salvation is a free gift. It's up to you whether or not you believe in it and accept the reality that God is real, that He really came down as man, died, then rose again.
Of course, people will sooner believe that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife and that Christmas is originally pagan, both claims with no evidence, than this.
Thallus (b. 52AD) might have wrote about a darkness and earthquake happening when Jesus was crucified.
Don't have his direct work, we have quote of a quote from a Christian apologist centuries later. Which even if Thallus has said there was an earthquake and there was one it would have made it easy for the Gospel writers to insert in.
Historical event happens.
Gospel writers use it to place Jesus at a certain time.
Historical event is mentioned
Therefore Jesus.
Sorry doesn't work. If I wrote a story about a guy who died on 9-11 proving 9-11 happened doesn't prove my guy existed.
Pliny the Younger (b. 61AD) testified to Jesus and talked how His followers thought He is God, and how they worshipped Him.
At this point I am pretty sure what kinda person you are. Pliny the younger wrote a letter 90 years after the supposed events mentioning Christians existing. That isn't proof of Jesus it is proof that Christianity existed in the 2nd century. Which everyone knows!
Phlegon (b. 80AD) likely confirmed the darkness and Jesus predicting the fall of the temple, also confirmed the crucifixion and resurrection
Again. Not a contemporary and we don't have what he wrote.
Celsus (b. 175AD) confirmed Jesus had powers and that He was believed to be born of a virgin
Again. Not a contemporary. You can't confirm in 210 AD events in 30AD.
Flavius Josephus (b. 37ad) confirmed He existed also and was reportedly resurrected.
Again not a contemporary. He has two passages referring to Jesus and wrote both 40 years after the supposed events. At best. Both passages passed through Christian hands for so long that even if there was a seed of truth to them we can't confirm it.
Passage 1. Is a known to be fraudulent passage. Expressing Trinity ideas that didn't even exist in the 1st century.
Passage 2. Is a likely fraud but even at best only confirms James existence which we already knew.
The Jewish Talmud confirmed Jesus existed and was crucified, although came 400 years after the fact.
The Talmud mentions two Messiah figures that are really not close to Jesus. The most in-depth one puts Jesus at 100BCE. Additionally we don't have any chain of custody on those stories.
Then there’s the entire Isaiah 53 prophecy we have from 700 years before Christ, the earliest copy being from 100 years before.
Only Chrisitian apologetics consider it to be talking about Jesus. No one else does. Read the whole page and it is clear it isn't. Also prophecy doesn't prove history.
Then of course you have the New Testament on top of that.
Yes those stories written in Greek by non-eyewitness as propaganda decades later.
This is more evidence than we have for other historical figures from around that time.
Let's see it.
Salvation is a free gift. It’s up to you whether or not you believe in it and accept the reality that God is real, that He really came down as man, died, then rose again.
Your god is a lie and your Messiah is a con made up by James and Paul to make money and get sex.
Of course, people will sooner believe that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and that Christmas is originally pagan, both claims with no evidence, than this.
Mary was most likely a paid actress and Christmas was pagan.
I love how after all of that saying "not contemporary" "not contemporary" "not contemporary" for stuff written closer in time to what we know about the majority of historical figures that lack contemporary records, just to try and claim the myth that "Christmas is pagan" despite there literally being zero evidence to support that.
What are you referring to as "Passage one". "Trinitarian ideas" literally appear in the Bible. Don't know what you're on about.
Only Chrisitian apologetics consider it to be talking about Jesus. No one else does.
Yeah because if they did then they'd be Christian apologists, won't they? (do suppose you could also perhaps be an Islamic or Mormon apologist if you did, but still)
Let's see it
I just shown you it.
Considering as well paul wrote about how he didn't have sex and hated having money, but the fact you just use really weak arguments that would dismiss the VAST MAJORITY of historical figures if applied to them goes to show the double standards required to achieve atheism.
Decades/centuries later is not contemporary. Half of the sources you listed are further in time than me and you are from the grandfather of George Washington for scale. Why does your god hate you so much that it can't just give you a single secular eyewitness?
I am sorry your Saturnalia didn't go well this year btw.
What are you referring to as “Passage one”. “Trinitarian ideas” literally appear in the Bible. Don’t know what you’re on about.
Of course you don't. When you blindly copy off blogs you miss naunce. Go right now and read the Annuals of the Jews, the complete context, of both passages. And while you are at it read what the Gospel of John really says and Paul while you are at it.
The Trinity is not in the Bible. Trinity-light ideas are in there. The Josphius passage expresses a more refined view of the Trinity that did not exist in 75AD. It also isn't in his writing style, is out of context, expresses Messiah views that go against other things the man wrote, and finally praises Jesus way more than any Orthodox Jewish person would.
But it gets worse. The first time this passage is even commented on is about 250-300 years later. The first person who mentions it existing was known to be pretty credulous and would have spent good money to anyone who had a book with his Lord in it. Additionally we have records of other people referencing that book and arguing about Jesus who don't mention that passage.
The second passage refers to James and just happens to use the exact same words that Matthew did at one point. Hinting that someone who knew the Gospel added this sentence fragment in. Now we have some ideas that James lived to be an old man but if you follow the timeline he would have been in his 80s if that James and him were the same person. Kinda hard to believe they would have even bothered killing a guy that old. In any case even if they had we still have to wonder why the Jews of Jerusalem suddenly like James and rioted over his death when we are told by other sources that he wasnt liked.
If we look at the James passage and take out the three words that clearly are borrowed from Matthew we get a much more straightforward story. A guy named James was some Rabbi and he got killed by another Rabbi during a religious multi-faction civil war and he was well liked by some so a riot happened. If we put those three words in we have the main character syndrome problem where everything revolves around James and at the same time no Roman leader moved against this guy despite decades of following the would be king of the jews.
Occum's razor. The passages are fraudulent.
Considering as well paul wrote about how he didn’t have sex and hated having money,
You are being credulous and I was more referencing the James community plus the 12. There are tiny references to some weird sex stuff going on and for people who claimed to hate money they seemed really good at getting it.
VAST MAJORITY of historical figures if applied to them goes to show the double standards required to achieve atheism.
Wait... sorry... you're actually claiming that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were actually written by those people as named in those gospels?
I don’t have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific
Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) *I* did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. *I* was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn't (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? "I am right and you cannot question that!" - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?
Anyway, it's a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.
And fwiw, Jesus hung out with "sinners" (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to "love one another, especially those you disagree with" so... even if this thought bugs you, you are actually "following the teachings of Christ" (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don't fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don't fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to "be nice", is it not?:-D)
You don't have to do anything, true. Feel free to completely disregard the Bible.
That being said, don't pick up Lord of the Rings, ignore it's genre and declare it pointless because Hobbits don't exist. The Bible has so many genres, because its a collection of stories and books rather than a single book, and you probably aren't aware of most of those genres because they no longer exist.
Again, feel free to completely ignore the Bible if you'd like, but saying that it's a mistake for anyone to try and figure out what one of the most influential books in the history of mankind was originally intended to say is wrong.
Now you are muddling. There is a difference between studying the book as a piece of historical literature and saying it doesn't say exactly what it says. If someone wants to waste as much time as I have doing that, they are welcome to. If someone wants to pretend it is NOT homophobic I will push back.
Here's the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.
The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.
I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c "they made it up", but b/c it actually did really happen... and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.
Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie "Knowing" with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie "The Matrix" did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.
Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe "the world-wide flood event" to a child, it would be both "yes it actually did happen" (most likely) plus also "it wasn't quite like that".
I don't think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.
There are so many inconsistencies with this stuff, but what bothers me most is something else. The whole thing is just needlessly cruel to all living beings, many of which did nothing wrong. An omnipotent god could have done something way less cruel and way more efficient if it wanted to.
Well, omnipotency is out, I believe. An omnipotent god needs, by definition, be equally able and likely to be exceedingly cruel as wellwilling. The question is, why would such a god hav given Noah the task of building an arc in the first place?
And the question of humanities "free will" is another nail in the coffin. Either humans only have free will for as much as whatever whim the omnipotent god allows for, or of the free will is immutable, then there is one thing the "omnipotent" god can't do, and thus omnipotence is out...
As i said, by definition. If there is anything holding such a deity from doing one thing, or the other, it is unable to do all things, thus not omnipotent.
I think it would help if I knew what definition you were using, I'm not sure where the equally likely part comes from. I think there would be a distinction between an omnipotent being being able to do a thing and choosing to do a thing.
Anyone interested in this, I suggest listening to the "Data over dogma" podcast.
The Bible is a book with multiple authors that had completely different conceptions of God and that borrowed local traditions for their own.
For example, the belief in one god is believed by scholars to be a later change to the Bible. In that region, it would be more common for the belief to be that there's a God of a land or nation with their power bound to that land. The world was viewed as one with a battle of the gods rather than being one with a supreme ruler.
This is why the Bible so often disagrees with itself. Because each author had their own motives and were sometimes responding to each other in their writings.
The extended universe is far too large and contradictory. Really we need Disney to just come in and buyout the whole Abraham franchise and just reset everything back down to a few core stories. And maybe forget about the Christmas special.
I am being pedantic here, but "cruelty" doesn't seem like quite the right word. If you made something, like a drawing or a story, and then got rid of it, the point isn't to cause suffering, but rather to throw it away. "Indifference" would fit better. And... either way, a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work? "Omnipotent" there being a relative word, that the ancient people's would not have been able to distinguish b/t forms like your more common garden-variety space alien (e.g. 2001 Odyssey) all the way up to external-reality entity (e.g. The Matrix).
Anyway my point is that it is people who are the ones that are cruel, b/c we are no better than anyone else, yet we delight in causing suffering. The only other animal I have ever heard of who shares that trait is the Chimpanzee, who btw also just so happens to be the closest living relative that humans have on this planet. \s on that being a coincidence ofc, when we share ~99% genetic similarity.
a Creator sorta by definition has the legal right to do so, with their own work?
What is different between this and a mother or father killing their own child because they 'created' it? I would say that if you create a thing with feelings, thoughts, flesh, and blood, you have the responsibility to take care of that thing, and if you don't that is cruel.
DO parents create their children, really, or do they just FAAFO? But if you write a computer program, don't you have rights to it? The latter is a thorny question indeed, if it develops sentience. So it seems like both yes, at a lower level, but then no once it rises to a similar level as you. Similar to how an embryo or even more so an unfertilized egg is not a "person" yet (except in the Southern USA), but an adult is. Or some people may argue that Might Makes Right, which most of us would disagree with, but e.g. the likes of Putin would still push forth. So there is indeed no consensus there, and likely never will be. But my main point here, besides simply listing some of these factors involved, is to say that the act of Creation seems to involve more than just fucking, even knowing full well that a child would result from that act - full Creation involves a much deeper commitment, hence a higher degree of ownership.
11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.
Genesis 7:11
So, like, most of the water probably came from underground, not from the rain. Though I'd imagine both were pretty bad.
Not saying the story is true or anything. Just pointing out the straw man, since the Bible doesn't claim all the water was from rain.
“At length, behold! there came our Command, and the fountains of the earth gushed forth.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:40
and
“O Earth! swallow up your water, and O Sky! withhold your rain! and the water abated and the matter was ended. The Ark rested on Mount Judi.” — Holy Qur’an, 11:44
The Red Sea food makes way more sense (ha). Especially when you consider what peoples’ sense of “the whole world” was at the time.
Though some thinkers did already know the circumference of the earth, which make Judaism and Christianity sound even more ass backwards when you consider it all.
He's implying the writer of Genesis should have known that the flood only covered their area instead of writing the whole world. Because someone in Greece already calculated the circumference of the earth at the time.
Either way the great flood is not just documented in the Torah which is interesting, and if findings are reported as true, it's not the first documentation of the flood.
Regardless, what was written and how the actual events transpired doesn't break the writings or purpose of them in Christianity/Judaism
The thing is, even if accounts of the flood was written before the Torah was written, it just further shows that it did happen. The earth's circumference was measured in 240bc by the greeks. Which is long after the flood no matter who you ask.
Oh I wouldn't know about the earth's circumference being measured. The comment about calling Christianity backwards because of some "enlightened" idea that there were mathematicians during the time of (in their eyes) "magic" being reported is insensible. Atheists will atheist.
Yeah. Another thing is that the word used "erets" doesn't always necessarily mean the whole world. If you consider where Eden was likely located (underneath the persian gulf) it would have definitely looked like a global flood of some kind to Noah. I think to say "Bible disproven because I take the flood account fully literally" is a bit silly.
If you look into flood myths, there are also hypotheses involving comet or asteroid impact flooding, which could have happened at many other times.
By the time the Greeks determined the circumference of the earth, this flood would already have been a legend and a fading cultural memory. It almost definitely would be oral history and not recorded in any physical form. What proof could anyone have that it didn't cover the whole world?
Not knowing about glaciation or interplanetary objects it would be extremely hard for the people of the era not to have decided that some spiteful god had tried to wipe out the entire earth.
There's a number of places where Old Testament stories may actually be describing the stories of Bronze Age Libyans who end up relocated into the Southern Levant along with the sea peoples. Joseph with a colorful coat and an interpreter of dreams is sometimes likened to the Hyskos but compare the coat vs the depiction of the Libu. Not only are the Libu sporting blue in their coats, like the tekhelet later found in the OT, there's even the Tuareg Libyan people known for their blue dye and matriarchal lineage.
Around the time that tomb image is recorded there's even a papyrus talking about how the followers of Set have red hair and interpret dreams, and this is also the period when the Egyptian story "A Tale of Two Brothers" emerges with a number of similarities to the Joseph story.
This is interesting in light of the flood mythos because we now know that at the end of the ice age there was a migration down from Europe across the ice bridge to North Africa. This was around the time there really was coastal flooding including relatively rapid events which may have even persisted in local oral traditions.
Part of the issue with analysis of Biblical stories in terms of historicity (outside of the supernatural stuff) may be that we're analyzing a collection of stories that had been syncretized into a local tradition and later appropriated, much like the story of 'Israel' (Jacob) taking the birthright and blessing of Esau (the eponymous founder of Edom, meaning 'red') in the Bible.
In fact, according to the Dead Sea scroll fragment 4Q534 Noah had red hair.
So it need not even necessarily be that there was flooding in the Southern Levant for the flood mythos to be based on an oral tradition.
All that said, personally I'm rather persuaded by Idan Dershowitz's analysis that the Noah story was originally a story of drought and famine before syncretizing the Babylonian flood mythos into it later on and transforming it into a flood epic.
No it isn't. Geology does not back up a global flood.
When it rains a lot and the ground gets saturated it can seem like the water is coming up from the ground. Also you know they had wells so they knew water is in ground.
Well aside from trapped water existing or not, this certainly didn’t happen. The geological layering of soil would tell us, the extinction events would tell us, and the fossils would tell us.
Not to mention there’s also a massive problem with heat and moving that much water so quickly.
It isn’t though. A worldwide flood would leave behind plenty of evidence in the geologic record. That it doesn’t exist makes it quite implausible. Making matters worse is the supposed time of the flood had many civilizations with extensive records for hundreds of years before and after forget to mention they were wiped out and instead just continued living through the flood without noticing it.
Surprisingly, it might be sort of true, in the sense of it being a tale coming form long time ago and speaking of an actual event. There are theories it refers to the time Mediterranean overspilled to the current Black sea, rapidly flooding huge areas that used to be land. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
This relates to the bible concept of firmament, flat earth and separation of waters, as in genesis when it says god separated waters above and below.
The nomads knew wells, rain, islands, tides and flooding rivers, so the world they conceptualised was one where God moved water above and below to reveal dry land. As such in the story it seemed logically consistent to allow massive amounts of water to come from above and below returning the world in what they considered a previous, erased state to reboot it.
So what does "equivalent to a firehose" mean in this case? What area per firehose? A football stadium per firehose? An Olympic swimming pool? An average room? A jar?
EDIT: I think it's about one firehose per 10x10 meter area, so like a couple of rooms worth of area. It's not that bad. I bet rainfalls like that do happen for a few minutes in taiphoons and such.
I assumed a firehose per area the size of a firehose
edit:
some quick googling says a 6cm firehose dumps about a cubic meter per minute, which works out to 500 meters of water per minute if we measured it like we measure rain.
about a cubic meter per minute, which works out to 500 meters of water per minute
Rain is usually calculated per m2.
1 m3 per minute is 60 m3 per hour.
10k mm rain per hour is 1 liter x 10k = 10 m3 per hour.
So I make it out to about a sixth of your firehose. Which still makes it way worse than any kind of weather you would call rain.
I'm not sure what other analogy would be closer?
Edit: Corrected to the quote I actually responded to.
No, it is a one dimensional number(excluding time) that works for any area. If you put two containers down in a rain, one 1m^2 area and one 1dm^2 area, both will collect water up to the same level.
Yes there will be 100 times as much water in total in the large container, but the height when spread in the container will be the same in both.
concentrating the water fall from a 1m^2 area into an area the size of a firehose is not how rain works. Rain happens spread out over the whole area.
When you calculate the volume, it's usually per m2. I quoted the wrong part.
So when you compare to a firehose, you must compare the volumes.
Tightly packed firehoses wouldn't make any sense, because that's not how firehoses work.
At least that was my interpretation.
that would be approximately 10000 mm rain per hour.
Also known as 10m/h.
Or departing from the realm of the useful completely, that's water pooling at roughly 1/30 of the speed with which an elite cyclist ascends a particularly steep gradient.
With a catchment area of "planet earth", that's roughly 5,100,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water an hour. That's more than twice the amount of beer Lemmy Kilminster drank in an entire year!
