On 30 Aug 2005 13:12:33 -0700, in talk.origins , "Jim Spaza"
<spaza9@yahoo.com> in
<1125432753.646771.10130@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> wrote:

Matt Silberstein wrote:

[snip]

Leviticus 18-20 all beginning with God telling Moses to speak to
Israel and tell them some rules. It seems like the same format and
structure and intent. Yet you think that some of 18 and some of 19
applies to you and some does not. And all of 20 does.

It's more than just Leviticus. We have to analyze the remainder of the
Bible where the Jewish people, prophets, angels, and even God instructs
the gentiles.

I point out these chapters in Leviticus because that is one of the
places we find the 10 Commandments, we find some sexual prohibitions,
and we find some other rules on mixing things. You see two of the
three as directed at you. You keep saying we need to analyze the rest
of the Bible, but you are ignoring the clear direct explicit word from
God that these chapters are directed to Israel.

[snip]

And, yet, you think that most, but not all, of Leviticus 18-20 apply
to you.

Leviticus itself does not apply to me. It is the laws which were
commanded to the gentiles which apply to me, laws, most of which, were
first spoken to the Jewish people themselves in Leviticus.

I am sorry, but I don't see how you and others can quote Leviticus as
showing that God is against homosexual acts when you then say
Leviticus does not apply to you. I don't understand how you and others
can say that the 10 Commandments applies to non-Jews and then say
Leviticus does not apply to you. Give up using any of Leviticus as
support for moral claims and I will believe you.

If
Leviticus was the only book in the Bible, then I'd say, apart from any
other revelation, that we gentiles could have a free for all on this
planet.

It is not simply free will, it is your willingness to selectively
quote the law here. You use some passages of Leviticus as law but
ignore others. Either it applies to Israel along (and Christians are
not part of Israel) or it applies to you (either as a gentile or
because Christ makes you part of Israel). But when you quote one verse
(explicitly directed by God towards Israel) and ignore a verse from
the next chapter that I have a problem.)
[snip]

Well, in a way, it may be a good thing. If God exists and if the Bible
is even somewhat accurate, then it allows to be considered conclusions
concerning origins of life that would be different from those of the
evolutionary and abiogenesis theories. It seems that this discussion
is a search for the accuracy of the Bible.

Not as far as I can see. No matter if any gods exist and any text has
any accuracy, the supreme authority about the world is the world
itself. If the Bible makes a physical claim either the claim is
correct or it is not, but either way the test is to look at the world,
not the Bible. Truth cannot contradict truth and the surest, most
authoritative, final source of truth about the world is the world. You
simply can't go to a text, any text, for such an answer.

I see your position much clearer now.

Good.

--
Matt Silberstein

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On Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:55:23 GMT,
Matt Silberstein <RemoveThisPrefixmatts2nospam@ix.netcom.com> wrote:

That all said, I am very distressed that we (and I include myself in
this) have all (again, I am solidly part of all) allowed this to
become a discussion of Jim's religious views and not of the science of
evolutionary biology.

I think the link here is that Jim does with the Bible what he does with
science, he picks and chooses the pieces that mesh with his own opinions
and preconceptions. He'll accept that a "day" in Genesis isn't 24 hours,
and thus accepts a 4.5 billion year old Earth, but by the same turn states
that the Flood happened. In much the same way, he declares that we
shouldn't kill witches, but homosexuality is wrong.

It's not really Jim alone, this is a feature of most Christians. They all
pick and choose the laws they believe apply. So while you may have people
who don't like self-professed witches (Wiccans proper), you don't see a lot
of them advocating the burning or stoning of them. You don't see Christians
denouncing none-Kosher foods, and they're response always is that they
aren't bound by the Mosaic laws, except of course for those laws that they
are still bound to follow, and you will get some long, stretched out but
utlimately non-explanatory explanation as to why some laws are still to be
followed and why others are to be ignored.

I give Jim credit, he's been patient, but the point of all of this is to
demonstrate to Jim that a truly literal interpretation of the Bible leads to
the sort of absurdities that Augustine warned against, that a Christian who
advocates such an interpretation will have done a disservice to Christianity
by insisting that the Bible says something that is contrary to what is so
obviously true.

Jim seems to have a good deal of baggage coming into this. Admittedly he
accepts more evolution than many here, but the truly unusual way on which he
declares that apes have common ancestors, except for humans, without any
emperical reason to do so, and the insistence that prayer and dreams fill in
the gaps, is at least an honest statement. Jim isn't pulling in all the
claptrap that we see from a lot of Creationists, with barrel fulls of
pseudoscientific nonsense. the stock and trade of AiG and the like. Still,
his genetic islands assertion and apparent rejection of Big Bang cosmology
(based, it seems, on a good deal of personal incredulity) demonstrates that
he will, when push comes to shove, dip into the pseudoscience well.

--
Aaron Clausen
mightymartianca@hotmail.com

On 24 Aug 2005 14:06:37 -0700, in talk.origins
"Jim Spaza" <spaza9@yahoo.com> wrote in
<1124917597.317536.268440@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>:

eyelessgame wrote:

Holy cats. Matt, you were wrong. Jim is utterly unable to think, at
least when it comes to these topics.

Jim Spaza wrote:

David Jensen wrote:

Abraham had two wives, but that didn't seem to be a problem for God.

Abraham had Sarah as his only wife.

Gen. 16:3: "And Sarai Abram's wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian,
after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to
her husband Abram to be his wife."

So "wife", in this divinely-inspired passage, is a word that means
"mistress".

Sometimes. The Hebrew word "ishshah" is in use here. This can mean
woman, wife, female (animals), or each/every. Hebrew is a
contextually-based language unlike English. Frequently, even people
who speak Hebrew fluently will not know the exact meaning of a sentence
unless it is combined with other sentences to add the proper context.
This is one example. You should never do a purely literal translation
of Hebrew word for word and expect the result to be 100% accurate
without looking at the context and the surrounding verses.

So, if you look at the various translations, how many choose a word
other than 'wife'? Why are you a better translator than the translators
of, say, the KJV or the NIV?

And in Luke 3:23: "And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of
age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of
Heli", this divinely inspired passage uses the word "son" when it means
"son-in-law".

Given that women had no legal standing in Jewish culture, needed a male
representative in public settings, and would rarely have been included
in geneologies, the use of Joseph at the end of each of the two
geneologies is not only expected but almost demanded. Again, you have
to know the culture in which the text was written.

Provide the evidence to support your claim.

Heck. Two thousand years from now, do you honestly expect anyone to
understand exactly what the English phrase "It's the bomb" means? It
could mean "Look, an atomic bomb has been detonated" or "That item to
which you are referring is superior, wonderful, and highly desirable."

Son and daughter are fairly stable concepts.

...

But every word of the Bible is divinely inspired. It's just, y'know,
sometimes the divinely inspired writers used words that stand for
completely different words.

That's Hebrew for you. It's far more contextual than English, which is
simpler in meaning and needs only a few words for proper context.

But no translators have ever noticed this.

By suitable reinterpretation of enough words, the Bible can say
precisely the same thing as the Koran.

Even if you were correct about Hebrew, it could never be interpreted to
anything near the Koran.

Why not?

Jim, you are inventing meaning -- or relying on the inventions of
others -- for sections of the Bible that do not say what you want them
to say.

Learn ancient Hebrew, study the Jewish culture of the time, and pray to
God for wisdom. If you haven't done all three, then by what
intellectual basis do you critique my interpretation of the Bible?

How do we learn a dead language, other than from the interpretations of
others who also never knew it? Even by the time of the Septuagint, the
subtly of the language had become obscure. How do you know, more than
two thousand years after the events, exactly what the words mean?

I have some advice for you, from an old source...

"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the
heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and
orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about
the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years
and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so
forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and
experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel
to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture,
talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to
prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast
ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so
much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside
the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions,
and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the
writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men."
- Augustine

Accurate quote, but keep in mind that much of the Bible doesn't make
sense to those who aren't saved and have God's Holy Spirit to give them
discernment and wisdom.

So you dismiss Augustine because you understand the Bible better than he
does.

"But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for
they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they
are spiritually discerned." - 1 Corinthians 2:14

There is a way for even skeptics to know if a Christian is telling the
truth about the Bible: read it for themselves and ask God for wisdom.

I have. I did. Nothing came of it. Why? Don't blame me. God's more
powerful than me, remember? If He exists and He wants people to
understand, He is utterly unjust to limit the folks to whom He allows
understanding. Why do you think that you understand?

For me, the Bible is one of many attempts to understand how God
operates. It is no more perfect than the writers of the Bible. It
contains errors, hubris, allegory, metaphor, stories from times that had
more gods, all mixed together. I try to get out of it what I can. I
refuse to claim that the writers from 2500 years ago knew more about
science or the general history of humanity than we do today.

You are doing your level best to make Christians look like fools.

I don't mean to. Yet, the near constant reply from many evolutionists
in this forum is for me to learn more about biology, geology, and
evolutionary theory. It is purported that this supposed lack of
knowledge on my part is why I don't understand the rationale behind the
conclusions made by the theory of evolution and abiogenesis.

No, it is the fact that you put your interpretation of the Bible above
the evidence that is available for all to see.

Fair enough. May I humbly suggest that you follow this advice when
dealing with the Bible. Maybe when we've both educated ourselves more,
we'll find ourselves in more agreement on some common issues.

I have read the Bible, completely. I am familiar with KJV, a beautiful
but obsolete translation, NEB and NIV. Many of your assertions about the
Bible cannot be supported by the actual words therein.

* The opinions expressed herein are my own and not that of my company
(which is so worried about public opinion that they are making me post
this disclaimer when they should be worried about all the waste, fraud,
and abuse within their own offices).

Americans think that hypocrisy is a virtue.