Sanctification

[Neutrino]

What about the geologic column and carbon dating?

What about clear indications of evolution along the way?

Or did you skip that thread that already addressed these issues that I posted?

So what about carbon dating? How does that work? Does it not measure the rate of decay of carbon? Are there variables? Say material was submerged under a flood that lasted oh saya year would it decay at the same rate as something I had sitting in the son for a year on my back porch?

Yes, but not enough to make any difference over a decent length of time.

[MeDeFe]

I don't believe C-14 decay is the same as, for example, a basking shark decaying.


Furthermore, I don't care what "people" accept as Homers work or not, I have just as few illusions regarding them as I have regarding the non-changeability of the bible.
It's just that noone's using Homers work to found a religion and tell other people how to live their lives.



And a question, just what is so important about the plesiosaur/basking shark?

So what if it really was a plesiosaur? What would that prove? Nothing more than that plesiosaurs didn't die out roughly 60M years ago. I don't see how it has anything to do with what has been discussed so far.

[Balsiefen]

"The Bible was edited countless times" is something people say because they've heard it somewhere. There is no proof, based on any scientific evidence, that the Bible was ever "edited". The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls pretty much laid that argument to rest. It is now an unfounded cliche thrown around by the unstudied.

First you have to contend with translation. This would lead room for much interpretation. On a parallel, ever read "The Master and Margarita"? It was written by a Russian author (in Russian) as a satire. However, several translations exist. With these several translations, different tones are set, and different interpretations are presented. To argue that editting did not occur is pure lunacy, and downright naive.

Next, we have that little issue where older manuscripts of the Gospel "Mark" seem to be missing 12 verses (notably, Mark 16:9-20). Editing, or did the author all of a sudden forget how to write (the transition is awkward at best)?

Moreover, we have to contend with that we do not have a single autograph copy of any of the New Testament writings. The oldest versions you'll find come from the third century. With this in mind, any number of fudgings, edits and other literary changes are impossible to trace.

But again, this is all moot considering that a dearth of evidence for Jesus is available.

What I find interesting is that when it comes to the bible it has to have 50,000 witnesses who all testified in court and they all had to have they testimonies authorized and put in a safe box and passed down through the geerations and no one could go near the place they were stored to prove there was not tampering.......and so on.
Did you ever stop to consider how much you would have to disregaurd if you use the same standards on other things of that time?
For instance. We only have copies of

Caesar's Gallic War? It was written between 58 and 50 B.C.. Scholars possess nine or ten copies, the oldest of which was written 900 years after the original.

The Roman history of Livy, written between 59 B.C. and 17 A.D.? Today we have twenty manuscript copies of portions of this work. The oldest copy in our possession (and that only fragments) was written in the fourth century A.D.


Plato's writings. Seven copies of Plato's works, written between 427-347 B.C., are available to us. The earliest copy we have is from 900 A. D.


we possess approximately 100 copies of Sophocles' works, written between 496-406 B.C. But the earliest manuscript is from the eleventh century A. D.


But classical scholars do not question these works. The copies are considered as good as the originals.


So using the same test, how does the New Testament compare? Please read carefully. There are 8000 manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, and 1000 manuscripts for the other earlier versions. There are between 4000 and 5000 Greek manuscripts and over 13,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament. The earliest copies of the Greek manuscripts date to the second and third centuries. That means the interval of time between the original and the copies we possess was within 200 years. Furthermore, nearly all of the New Testament can be reconstructed from quotations of early Christian writers.

These works are quetioned by historians, we have no idia whether they are the origionals. However they have less of an effect on politics than the bible so it is less likely they were edited

however it is documented by the romans that for the new testement four of the thirty or so gospels were chosen because they were more mainstream and rarely contradicted each other, even if they were written 30 years after Jesus
the old testiment was compiled by the same peope from the stories they thaught most relevent

[unriggable]

So what about carbon dating? How does that work? Does it not measure the rate of decay of carbon? Are there variables? Say material was submerged under a flood that lasted oh saya year would it decay at the same rate as something I had sitting in the son for a year on my back porch?

Carbon dating, if my science teacher is right, uses Carbon 14 to determine the age of something. Since organic materials always have carbon, it is very easy to find their age with this method. And since it is an atom and not an organic material, water has no effect; C14 decays (or 'switches') into C12 at a constant rate, with surroundings playing almost no role (heat, I think, is the only thing that can really screw this process over).

[luns101]

Carbon dating, if my science teacher is right, uses Carbon 14 to determine the age of something. Since organic materials always have carbon, it is very easy to find their age with this method. And since it is an atom and not an organic material, water has no effect; C14 decays (or 'switches') into C12 at a constant rate, with surroundings playing almost no role (heat, I think, is the only thing that can really screw this process over).

Your teacher is right and you have a very good memory. Jessie's point was that there were originally problems with carbon-14 dating due to the assumption that decay rates were constant and that those problems have been fixed by 'recalibration' and cross-referencing dates from the field of dendochronology. Since his post was rather long, I will quote it for you so to save you some time.

A common misperception of C14 dating is that it relies on the assumption that atmospheric C14 levels remained constant in the past so that we can know how much C14 an organism started off with. While this was an assumption made when the technique was first developed about half a century ago it has not been the case for several decades. Historical atmospheric C14 concentrations have been charted and calibrated using both dendochronology and lake varves which incorporate organic sediment in their annual deposition layers.

This is of course, a position that I disagree with. I believe that these 'calibrations' had to take place in order to avoid the dating discrepancies that were occurring. I presume you'll take the opposite position. Oh well, I'm going to spend my remaining free time in some other of the more lighthearted threads...haha.

We can all wish Jessie a good vacation at least!

[Abishai]

even if they were written 30 years after Jesus
the old testiment was compiled by the same peope from the stories they thaught most relevent

What do you mean the Old testament was compiled by the New Testament writers? That disreguards history. By the time of Christ's life the last OT book had been written for 400 years and the jews had already set the OT and were using it. And once again you can check the manuscript evidence and find that the different scrolls found at different times in different cultural surroundings lend very crediable evidence that the scrolls changed very little. We see enough discpepencies to see that real humans copied them and made mistakes in the copies in very minor points that deal with no major doctrines in scripture, but we see that they are far superior to copied texts of the times. (Really not that hard if you believe that there is a creator and he has the power to preserve the message he wants to tell. If He cannot then he is not "all powerful")
As a matter of fact if you knew your history you would realize that the Ot had been translated into the greek called the Septuagint between about the 3rd and 1st century BC. This tended to be the most used version by new testament authors. If you look at the wordage of their quotes in the NT you will find at times they say the same thing, but use different wordage, wordage used in the Septuagint. Never really studied why, but I would assume that the uneducated fishermen probally spoke the koine (common) greek language most often or exclusively based on the fact they did not have the language schooling the religious leaders would have had.

[PimpCaneYoAss]

Love you too hector, oh btw did you just fart in my general direction?

Yes. Now go away or I shall mock you a second time!

Why did you smell some vasoline?

[Abishai]

If there are prophecies in the bible which the bible in other places claims came true, it's not much different from an author putting in prophecies in a novel and then later having them come true in this novel. Yes, I know, "the texts were written by different people several hundred years apart", it really isn't hard to add a line somewhere, or even just change a name to make it fit current events. I have few illusions regarding those points.

But that is not the case. We have found copies that were written hundreds of years before the NT and found in places that the NT writers did not have access to nor anyone else till we found them and they say the same prophecies the disciples talked about Christ fullfilling. What is more is it is not one, but hundreds. To make it more clear they are specific not like the ones everyone claims that someone like Nostradamus made. They have specific references. Like that jesus would be born in a specific spot out of a specific lineage, what he would say on the cross, that he would die on a tree. You see if there was only one text that existed we could rightfully say someone rewrote it or added lines. But we see that there were copies that the disciples had access to and there are copies that we are finding today that were buried hundreds of years before the disciples were born and they say the same things. No one had the chance to rewrite them.
The thing I have not heard on this thread is this, Christianity is not concerned with pushing its own agenda. It is concerned with the pursue of truth. Especially The Truth. Jesus Christ. John says this "Jesus answered, 'You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.' " (John 19:37) Jesus also said he was The way, The Truth and The life. (John 14:6) Christianity is concerned with what Jesus Christ did for us because we could not do it ourselves. And God is powerful enough to present the truth thru people who want to present it.

And before you say the truth cannot be known or there is not absolute truth let me say this if you say their is not absolute truth you are giving me an absolute statement which by your own words defeats itself, because if there is no absolute truth, then you cannot know for sure absolute if there is or is not absolute truth.
And there are absolute truths. All die. All are born using some form of genetic material (egg and sperm, so way of passing on the dna where in a test tube or naturally.) Everyone who is alive has blood running through their veins and arteries. I can go on and on there are proofs of absolutes so we cannot say there are none. So if there are proofs in what we know there can also be proofs in what we cannot see or taste or feel.

[Abishai]

Love you too hector, oh btw did you just fart in my general direction?

Yes. Now go away or I shall mock you a second time!

Why did you smell some vasoline?

Simplely made a monte python refrence to go along with his picture because I happen to have seen the movie a long time ago. No thing more, no thing less.

[Abishai]

MeDeFe wrote

As for "not needing fairy tales", our whole lives consist of nothing BUT fairy tales. "Justice", "Freedom", "Honour", "Purpose in Life", "Moral", "Self". They and many more are all things that humans have made up in order to be able to live in a way they consider desireable. Always influenced by their previous experiences and the things they had been taught by others. There you've also got my idea of "The Self" in a nutshell. "I" am made up of "my" experiences, and what other people who are made up in the same way (just by different experiences) have told "me". The "core" of my personality is the imaginary point where all these experiences intersect and interact. If there's also a soul there, I don't know.

Ever wonder where those things came from? "Justice, Honor, Freedom Purpose in Life." How is it that people cannot seem to agree about the simplest things, but if someone cuts infront of you in line the most natural reaction is hey that is not fair. Some how all human being have a sense of right and wrong. (Though some peoples sense of what is wrong seems to know very little. It has been my experience that by talking to them they will have some sort of list on what is wrong and what is right.) As C.S Lewis said people in different cultures may disagee how many wives you can have, but everyone agrees one man cannot have every women alive. And people from differnt cultures all seem to have different creation stories and stories dealing with these themes of honor and justice and so on. So similar and some of them written before the cultures met other cultures. This is what Luns was talking about, about the Bible providing answers. If we believe what scriptures tell us then it is desires and ideals placed in us by God to draw us to Him. To see there is something beyond this motal life. To see some thing horrible has gone wrong and we do not act the way we ourselves think we should and others do not act that way either. It is not hard to wonder why almost every cultural we have found has a flood story in their "mythos" dispite some of these cultures being isolated from others by oceans. We all have common threads that came from our ancestors who all came from Adam and Eve.
I mean really how much knowledge do we have of everthing in the universe? Even if we say 50% (Which I believe is incrediblly high.) Is there not room for God and things that cannot be explained in that 50%?
I will admit I see things in scripture that seem to be contradictions, but as time has gone by I have come to see that a lot of those have been misunderstanding of the text on how things work or what was being said. The others are still a mystery to me. Some where we fill in the gaps with faith. Just as evolutionist fill in their gaps by believing that theory is true dispite what they see as apparent gaps.
Heavycola wrote

ONE MORE THING: your response to Jesse's evolution 101 demonstrates how much thinking and research about this you have done, but it is still, like all 'serious' creationist arguments, just a series of attempts to point out the gaps in evolutionary theory - gaps in the fossil record, in our understanding etc. But so what? Even its adherents can't agree! A lack of evidence for a transitionary fossil hereor there is not evidecne FOR creationism. In fact I would love to hear any evidence actually in support of it.

I mean if there is no evience, then an argument can be made either way. No evidence does not prove it exists, but no evience does not prove it does not either.
But I now enter a realm where I am not an expert so I will leave the evolution debate to someone more qualified than I. My evidence would be dismissed because it comes not from texts books or fossil dating, but from experience of seeing the state of man that the Bible talks about proven correct as well as its historical componets and literary themes and it textural history verified much more acurately then anything else in the era of antiquity. If something is proven correct that says something else is incorrect, then I am not worried about trying to prove that something incorrect I will stick with them item that was proven correct. Kind of funny to think about Christ not existing when more was written about him both good and bad than any other one thing in the ancient world.

[Abishai]

To Jesse Bad Boy

I found my sources. "In 1968, an ancient burial site was uncovered in jerusalem containing about thirty-five bodies. It was determined that most of these hadd suffered violent deaths in the Jewish uprising against Rome in A.D. 70. One of thee was a man named Yohanan Ben Ha'galgol. He was about twenty-four to twenty-eight years old, had a cleft palate, and a seven-inch nail was still driven through both his feet. The feet had been turned outward so that the square nail could be hammered through atthe heel, just inside the Achilles tendon. This would have bowed the legs outward as well so that they could not have been used for support on the cross. The nail had gone through a wedge of acacia wood, then through the heels, then into an olive wood beam. There was also evidence that simlar spikes had been put between the two bones of each lower arm. These had caued the upper bones to be worn smooth as the victim repeatedly raised and lowered himelf to breathe (breathing is restricted with the arms raised). Crucifixion victims had to lift themselves to free the chest musclesand, when they grew too weak to do so, died by suffocation.
Yohanan's legs were crushed by a blow, consistent with the common use ot the Roman crucifragium (John 19:31-32)." .... Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman L. Geisler. p. 48

[The Gunslinger]

why must people start religious discussions? how bout you believe what you want and i beleive what i want?

[Skittles!]

why must people start religious discussions? how bout you beleive what you want and i beleive what i want?

Because some people can't accept that and in believing in the delusion they think they must make everyone their belief. It's been happening for a long time, I don't think it'll stop soon.

[luns101]

why must people start religious discussions? how bout you believe what you want and i beleive what i want?

How about you go win the riddle contest against Blaine the Mono. After that, try rescuing those kids from the Wolves of the Calla. Hile Gunslinger!!

How did that do 'ya...Did it do ya just fine, Roland?

[The Gunslinger]

why must people start religious discussions? how bout you believe what you want and i beleive what i want?

How about you go win the riddle contest against Blaine the Mono. After that, try rescuing those kids from the Wolves of the Calla. Hile Gunslinger!!

How did that do 'ya...Did it do ya just fine, Roland?

hahah thats like that 3rd time ive got something like today. your a few books back though actually im on the last book.

[MeDeFe]

Abishai, don't confuse my position with relativism. I'm saying that the values that we as humans have have been made up by humans and have proven to be of advantage and have become ingrained into our behaviour. Some of them might even be just behavioral instincts that were more likely to be passed on than others.
An example: take gratitude, it's better to help someone you know will be grateful than someone who will not be grateful, right? He's more likely to return the favour and will be less likely to harm you. So, "cavepeople" (or whatever) that were predisposed to be grateful were more likely to receive and, subsequently, to give help. Known ingrates would be more likely to be left behind and would die earlier than others.
Add the social factor, humans learn by observing, small rituals will be noticed and copied, like saying "thank you" when someone gives you something. And so we go from a predisposition to a social behaviour. Of course this is just a model that took just a few minutes to make up and write down, but it's workable.

As for pure values.
Take something simple like "All men are equal". Equal rights, equal standing before the law and so on. To someone living 500 years ago this would have been inconceivable, how could a farmer have the same rights as the king? Or a merchant the same rights as nobility? 200 years ago Egalité was one of the big slogans of the french revolutionists. The idea appeared somewhere along the way (probably when people started noticing that the system they were living in had flaws) and by now it's an integral part of our value system.



You also asked what someone meant when he said the OT was compiled by the writers of the NT. I don't know who said that, but it's not true. What is true however is that the OT and NT were compiled by the same people. Note that "to compile" is not the same as "to write".
As for sources, I got this from the foreword to my king James bible. It was from the Oxford University Press I think, I can give you the ISBN number too if you like.

[Abishai]

To MeDeFe

But the idea that the compilers of the OT were the compilers of the NT is false. That is of course unless thoe compilers were able to live hundreds of years. The OT was already written and compiled by around the 3rd century B.C. Yet the NT books were written by the end of 100 AD and compiled by the 3rd century AD. That is a span of hundreds of years? The NT authors did not even use the original hebrew, it had already been translated into greek around the 3rd century B.C..
Also I like your model, but I would disagree on one point. It is not that these values were made up by humans, but perverted or twisted by humans. For example. Being kind to someone who will be greatfull and be in a postion to pay you back is really selfishness. But the scriptures talk about that. They tell us Jesus said when you throw a party invite those who cannot invite you back. Or love your enemy instead of treating him as he treats you. See I do not see any proof that these are things were made up by humans. What does it benefit me to let my neighbor have my cloak and my tunic if he wants my cloak or to lend without expecting payment. (Lk 6:27-36) In human thinking that is crazy. it is just a way to lose money and to be taken advantage by others. Or when Jesus sai the greatest people are the ones who serve, not the ones who lord theeir power over others and make others serve them. There is something more than just man made ideas and teaching and social training.
I will agree about equal rights an things like that. But that doe not change the fact that if somone was wronged they still want "justice" I see this priciple at work in my kids and the littlest one is not 1.5 years old yet. My first child learned how to lie and to be selfish from almost the start. I did not teach him these things. They are a natural part of being a "sinner" one who wants hi own way. They are natural to men a you were saying.
Did I address what you talked about? I did not try to mistake what you were saying for realitism. I will have to go back and read the posts. It has been a while. I cannot even remember what I said. Sorry. I must have gotten cornfused. yes corn...fused. I will make sure I read it before I get back on.
[/quote]

[Abishai]

Sorry Gunslinger. Nebraska may have gone 9-5 and won the big 12 north, But I will always be a Mizzou fans. MIZ...ZOU....

[MeDeFe]

"to compile" essentially means to take parts (or the whole) of other things and putting them together to make something new.

The Old Testament is compiled of several different books that were seen as separate books until they were put together by early christians (I'd have to get that bible to quote properly).
Same for the NT.
The Torah (which is NOT a just bible without the NT) was compiled around the same time.

The authors of the texts that were included were of course dead by the time these books were put together.


There, that should make it clear.



And what you said about the model... well, that's the beauty of it, in this case it takes something that most people say people are born with (selfishness and learning by observing) and shows how it can become an ingrained and socially reinforced behaviour that in this case is seen as morally acceptable.
Humans aren't the only species helping each other when there's no immediate gain. I've read there is some sort of whale that can't mate unless there's a third one "keeping them in position" where's the immediate gain for this third one?



And about justice, again, this is just off the top of my head, but what if justice is no more than the selfishness of several people reaching a consensus? Everyone wants as much as he can get, but if there isn't enough around there are two choices, fight it out until someone (or several someones) is dead (which might turn out to be you) or split it.

As an experiment try offering people half a dollar just like that or flip a coin and if the person calls heads or tails correctly he gets a full dollar. I predict that most people will take the 50 cents, even though they don't risk losing anything (you do have cents, don't you? I always get confused with all those dimes and nickles(sp?)).
People will usually pick the safe option with a smaller but secure gain over the potentially more rewarding option that includes the possibility of zero gain or even a loss.
If you asked people if they want to flip a coin and the loser pays the winner money they'll probably refuse outright. Unless you're in Vegas of course, there it's likely to work.

Enough with examples. Again, give this behaviour enough time to become ingrained and socially reinforced and you may end up with justice. And just how does your 1.5 year old want justice? Is it wanting a cookie when everyone else gets one or is it more?