While you, a self identified christian(?), and a majority of others do denounce people like Camping, you never actually addressed the question. The poster wasn't suggesting you embrace Camping, just explain how someone can read the bible and come to such conclusions as he did if the bible is the perfect word of god.

Do you think Camping believes himself to be christian?

 

The answer to that question is that you can't come to Camping's conclusion unless you ignore what the Bible actually says.  The original post wanted me to explain this, but wanted to limit me from using the one explanation that was true. If you actually read the Bible, and not just try to use it a source of secret numbers for calculations, then you don't get Camping's conclusions.

 

As for your last question, I do not know.  I cannot believe that someone truly follows Jesus, if they ignore what he said in order to make there own rules.  And it is not just a "few verses". Camping's doctrines are way outside of Christianity.

 

 

Hi, Joe -- perhaps you could address the topic from a slightly differen perspective.  On a popular CNN forum, I've been reading some atheist and Christian reactions to the failure of Mr. Camping's prediction.   The Christian responses have uniformly cited Camping's ignorance of Biblical teaching about the end of time -- that his mistake in all this was the arrogance to calculate a date for something the Bible says will come "as a theif in the night," at a time nobody can predict. 

Ridicule from Christians has focused on Camping's audacity in trying to predict a date for Biblical prophecy.  I would submit, however, that in doing so the Christians are in fact mocking the prophecies themselves, right along with all the rest of us.  It's not the naming of a date that everyone, including Christians, realizes is an expression of madness, it is exposing to the light of day those events that are supposed to take place on that date -- whether it occurs now or sometime in the future.  

Mainstream Christianity makes the same predictions as Harold Camping -- only mainstream Christianity defers this dire apocalypse into the fog of an abstract future, a mist so thick as to be indistiguisable from fantasy.  You believe in it, becuase it is pushed so deeply into your imagination that you don't really expect to have to deal with it actually happening.  When confronted with the reality of such an occurance in the real present, by virtue of a literalist such as Camping, you Christians are able to see its absurdity -- the bubble of your daydream is burst and your impulse is to restore it by denigrating Camping only for naming a date.  But it is not the date that is crazy.  What Christian doctrine has built its empire around, is an insane prediction that is identical to Camping's.  You might consider this recent event a rehearsal for what your reaction to the real event would be.  For first of all, the time of your fantasy end will never come, the fog protecting it will never lift -- but if it did, your reaction would be to resist it just as you did on May 21.  Because it's not the date that is wrong with this vision -- it is that the vision is utter whimsy, and for anyone who is not as crazy as Camping, like you for example, reality always prevails in the real world.  

 

I suppose many people make that conclusion instead of reading the Bible for themselves.  Should we do the same with all the scientific data out there?  Most fossils when tested by two or three different labs will get two or three different age results.  Should we just conclude that the process is not clear and throw it all out?

Mr. Camping did not answer his critics with the Bible.  He used it and ignored what it actually said in order to further his own purposes.

 

 

I do my best to do so.  I am human, so many times I fail.  But that is just more evidence to believe the Gospel and my need for a Savior.  If I could follow all the rules, I wouldn't need Him.

 

 

This is just your personal, and incorrect speculation and generalization.

 

I can say, with just as much confidence, that your lack of god is yours .

 

Have a good day,

Joe

 

Actions speak louder than words. The fact is your own survival is your morality and not the bible. You can't have any other because you have no free will. This is consistent with evolution.

So why put on the charade? You're not fooling anyone. Your 'faith' is just a game you play to gain some of social advantages.

 

So to continue the story, all the daughters and sons figure out that they can speed and daddy will pay all the fines. So everyone drives as fast as they can. Without a deterrent, they kill themselves and others leading to tons of misery. They don't worry about the consequences of their actions because they believe daddy will take care of everything.

This human misery caused by speeders continues for many centuries until some people of reason and science decide to apply reason and science to the problem of accidents caused by speeders. Then the problem of speeders can be solved.

Jesus' death did not bestow any demonstrable benefits on anyone - the 'punishments' he absolved them of, or took onto himself, were only hypothetical, the rules that had been infringed to make them 'sinners' were ones he, as God, imposed, so a simple pardon is all that would have been necessary, logically.

And as EXC points out, it comes awfully close, depending how you interpret it, to allowing everyone open slather, as long as they promise to 'own up' on their death-bed.

And it also makes no particular reference to the only meaningful atonement for actual wrong-doing, which is attempting to make reparations or apologies or consolation to the victims of any 'sins', or their friends and family.

IMHO, the crucifixion is a morally bankrupt scenario.

 

Ktulu,

 I would like that, but I am not sure how to setup a debate. I believe the admins have to do it.

Joe

Why are so many YEC's trained as engineers, including joe?

This makes me cringe, because I attribute much of my scientific and skeptical outlook to the training in science and math I received in gaining my degree in Electrical Engineering. The first half of the course was common with other branches, apart from Civil Engineering (mainly aimed at the construction/building industries) which separated in second year.

Well, no one finds exactly how old something is by carbon testing, or half-life testing. Which is why old bronze age empires and city-states have specific events or lifetimes of persons listed as a range. The same goes for the Chalcolithic and Neolithic. Without cheating, I couldn't say if it's the median or mean that's more important to a group of test results like these.

 

On the other hand, one can not say the same thing about "reading the bible". The book itself may not be open to interpretation, (well, the NT portion anyhow) but people still focus on their favorite parts anyways. IE, the parts that are the greatest boon to their ego. It seems not really a question of the bible but of simple psychology. But the bible is the "infallible word of God" so there isn't any room for 'pick n' choose' followers... is there?

ps: You don't really expect us to start reading the Bible just because you think it's a great idea?

I learned those statistics while taking criminal psychology. The specific text book I used is more than 50km away, so I can't reference you to it directly, but these are semi-old studies, and shouldn't take too long for you to find.

Not at all. But can you look at a thousand pages simultaneously?

Fortunately DNA is much less complex than a religion. 4 chemicals interacting. No biggy. Learn a few equations and it's not hard.

You just shot your credibility in the foot. I'm not even a biblical scholar and I know the bible was assembled from books written in Latin.

They`d just use the recordings, not the people.

Either you misunderstood my point or you're blatantly wrong. It has been proven time and again that use of certain substances, as well as simple age, can have a measurable negative impact on memory retention.

Pretty disgusting too. Why didn't the judge pay for the other peoples tickets too? I doubt the girl was the only one who couldn't afford it. Why didn't he just set up a payment system that she could afford? How is she going to learn from this when the only consequence was spending a couple minutes at her dads job?

Theres a sub forum that specifically deals with all the errors found in the bible:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forums/religionandirrationalities/biblicalerrancy
I never bothered reading the whole thing, I found the writing primitive and poor. I literally can't stomach it. But the big one that hit me was the whole incest thing. If all humanity descended from adam and eve, and it's wrong to sleep with family members, then everyone who ever had sex is or is on the way to being in hell. By gods willful and immoral design.

Vastet, the first step to getting yourself out of a hole, stop digging.   Do a little research and ask yourself, "How did documents dated at 700 BC get written in Latin, when Latin didn't manifest until 75 BC?" Latin is only a translation of the original manuscripts.

 

Why would I need to look at thousands of pages simultaneously when any given topic may have only five our ten relevant passages?  And yes, I can look at all the relevant passages of a topic, or all the occurrences of given word in the original non-Latin language at the same time. Computers are great.   But again you try to make it sound like in order to understand concepts in the Bible, that you have to understand, and have memorize, the entire Bible. That is as ridiculous as saying that you have to memorize a biology book to understand that DNA is made up of 4 chemicals.

 

Yes, I completely misunderstood your statement. Sorry about that. I did not catch that you meant "substances" that the person would be on.

Sorry, what I did not make clear in the analogy is that the judge is willing and able to pay for everyone, but they have to come and ask him to before getting to court. Once in court, he is the judge, not 'dad'.  Oh there are other consequences for the girl, just not the big 'fine' in the court.  As for a payment plan... if we move the analogy back to God, the 'fine' is death. There is not really a payment plan for that.

EXC, and kind of to Bob too,

What you fail to see is that even if that were true, the disbelief of the scientists and even the remedy they come up with for speeders, does not in any way negate the judge or his love for them or his payment for the fine.  What you also forget, is that as an analogy for Christianity, the sons and daughters have to ask for daddy to pay ahead of time.  They need to go to him and say, "I've sped and I need you to pay for me, and I will be a better, safer driver from now on."  If they get to court and he sees in their record that they lied and actually drove faster and more recklessly after their talk, then he isn't going to pay the fine.  Sure, he knows they all screw up and get tickets once in a while. As long as they have tried to be better drivers, then he pays.   I was going to quote a Bible verse that addresses your do-what-you-want scenario exactly, but I assume you would just ignore it.

I see I really need to do better at putting entire analogies together to start with, because you guys a certainly not going to fill in the gaps.

That's the thing, Vastet.  People make so many assumptions about what the Bible says, instead of reading what's there. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam and Eve are the only two people that God made in that fashion. In Genesis 4:17 it says, "Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. " That is the first time it speaks of a wife for Cain. In any other book, if it said the same thing, without discussing where the wife came from, no one would jump to the conclusion that it was his sister. Adam and Eve were the first, it never says only.

Most of the 'inconsistencies' and 'contradictions' that people throw out there, if they even know of any themselves, are just contradictions in their interpretation, not in what the Bible actually has written.

Thank you,

Joe

The message of the Adam and Eve story is you must obey authority, whether their edicts make sense to you, or seem good or bad, under threat of violent punishment.

It is the message of a Hitler, a Stalin.

To rub it in, it then is used to justify punishment of the descendents of the 'sinners'.

Even as the fairy story it is, it demonstrates the evil inherent in the that mind-set.

To quote a sentence from a character in a book I am reading currently, by Terry Pratchett, after witnessing some cruelties of nature:

"If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior".

If no one sold him an invisible friend claim, he wouldn't have been able to peddle his superstition. Belief in invisible friends starts as a result of a parent, or society introducing them to the claim. I

AND, fyi, you calling him a crackpot to us is like a Star Wars fan arguing with a Star Trec fan at a si fi convention. You do understand that both you and he buy the claim of an invisible magical super brain?

Arguing over the details of how this fictional super hero is arranged misses the point that it takes a belief in an invisible magical super brain, even before one gets to details and labels.

We are very realistic in that people will always believe things we find absurd. BUT we wish the moderates in theism would demand that these nutcases not peddle this crap. It is hard enough dealing with "magic man Lite" people.

You could call your god Allah, or Vishnu, or Thor, humanity does not need nuts selling "end times", or slamming planes into buildings, or shooting abortion doctors. We know that YOU can live without an invisible friend belief, and even if you never change your mind, could you AT LEAST, take to task the nuts in your own bunch?

 

 

This is where I think the battle over reality can be won. Lots of people, spend time trying to de construct the Yellow Brick road. Although important, you still need the brass knuckle (metaphorically of course) approach of pointing out their own absurdity when they point out other's absurdities.

If someone said "That Big Foot claim is absurd and bullshit", but they themselves claim invisible pink unicorns, simply remind them what they believe and remind them they have as much evidence for their claim as the ones they themselves scoff at.

In this case, BOTH this nutcase selling the end of the world, and people who don't buy it, but still believe in magic babies with no second set of DNA, simply remind them that they have the same super hero.

Again, if a Christian wants to say, "Yea this guy is nuts", I agree, but why would it be any more rational to claim magic babies?

When this infighting amongst a label starts, to me it is like a Star Trec fan arguing with a Star Wars fan. Or it is like two Dungeons and Dragons fans arguing over the rules and role of the dice.

I love it when a believer (of any religion) tries to pull "I am not like the others". No one is saying you are like the others. But you are the same in the amount of evidence you have for your fictional pet deity claim.

You can wrap an empty box in countless pretty wrapping of all different colors and patterns with all sorts of different ribbons and bows, but the box is still empty.