This is exactly my point, much like examples that are in this forum.

Agreed, lets keep the doors open. Here is a nice story about this.
http://www.iamanexmormon.com/2011/03/we-are-the-leavitt-family/

Balstrome, they haven't had anything new for centuries,but closing the doors would make us as close minded as they are, I would think we must keep our/the doors open if just because we may help someone break free as many here have done. In any event closing the doors also seems to smack of both censorsism and elitism,when we close the door we also here at least close our minds to posabilities. This, the concept of the closed mind is what I have long thought was the worst thing about faith/belief/religon at least in the long term effects. Believing,and having faith in some thing to the point that you deny even what you see is a path to extinction,change and growth is reality and will lead to survival the other equals stagnation and death in the end.

Can we close the doors, only opening them for converts to our side, because they have nothing to support their world view? Have we actually debunked all their reasons for belief, do they have nothing left?

The problem with your analogy Balstrome is that there are no 'Grand Masters' on the Christian side that can play the game within the rules defined here. Different games; different rules.

They want you to "take it on faith" that they're playing chess when in reality they don't even have any pieces on the board! I can just hear Ray Comfort running with this analogy, "How could there be a chess board without a chess board maker? How could there be a checkered design without a designer?"

Off topic, slightly
I once saw a tv magician play chess against nine grand master chess players at once, and win most of the games. Of course he was not playing the games but just memorising the moves of one player and using them to play against another player and so on, so the players were playing the other grand masters.

Now, I wonder if a skilled troll could find a forum such as this one and a forum for Christians and do the same, copy and paste replies back and forth. Okay now that I think about it, I do not see a point to do this.

@Len.
Different cultures had different length week throughout history. The most convincing explanation I seen for the 7 day week is that it represent the 5 visible planets plus the sun and moon. The Jews inherited the 7 day week from the Babylonians and incorporated it into the bible which had then a big part of popularizing it as Christianity and then Islam were growing.

I'm sure I used to know this (getting forgetful in my old age), but why do we have weeks of seven days? Why not 10 days or 6 days? Is it only driven by the bible / torah / talmud / koran / whatever other holy book?

Reading through the reviews, yeah that seems like what I was looking for. Holy smokes though, $27 for the audiobook (I like to listen on my way to work). Been thinking about getting a subscription to audible.com so maybe I will pick it as my free one. Too bad it is only OT though since a lot of Christians now seem to take the position that OT doesn't much matter, it is all about Jesus instead. Thanks Agathos. Appreciated.

Jeremiah,

For Hebrew Bible I suggest James Kugel's How To Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. It covers many of the issues in the development of the singular texts themselves and their collecting together. It also traces the history of interpretation of some of the books which is valuable as you see the parallels to how persons in the first century were reading similar texts in light of their social/religious experiences. It is easy to read and would give you a good background to much scholarship in the modern era (though of course, 'scholarship' has moved past JEDP and other staples of earlier study)

Since this thread has kind of drifted off into bible interpretation I just wanted to toss this question out there for Agathos (or anyone interested really). Since I don't have the 4+ years (nor inclination) to get a degree in biblical studies I'm curious if you have any single resource that would you recommend on such a subject?

Obviously condensing any subject down to a microwavable chunk is difficult but in this and other threads you have referenced events surrounding the circumstances of the writing of various parts of the bible such as the order they should be read etc and I think that is something I would be interested in learning more about.

Nox,

The actual pattern isn't that light was created before the sun, though that is the case. In Gen 1 there is a correlation between what is created on one day and what fills it on a parallel day: 1-->4; 2-->5; 3-->6; Make a chart 1, 2, 3 on one side of a paper and 4, 5, 6, on the other across from each other and you can see this. And I would also suggest in the context of the Torah, day seven is the most important rhetorically (i.e., Sabbath).

A good exercise that I have used with a few people is to have them draw the creation story as I read it (usually an on the fly translation, but important to communicate ideas like 'fixed dome' over the earth). Without fail every time I have done this when I was on day one and said, "God created light" the person has drawn a sun. they get rather confused when you get to day four and say and God created the greater light.

Then I show them the parallels of the days and suggest that what we are reading is more literary and less literal.

"In my post-victory world, where no one takes the bible literally, the bible wouldn’t be completely discarded. There would still be a copy in every library, and anyone who wanted to read it could. The bible would continue to be read for what it can tell us about the people and cultures that produced the bible, and not what people think it can tell us about god."

Several copies of it reside in my personal library for this very reason.

"In my mind it is as much an atheist mistake to read Genesis 1 and say, "Hey the world can't be created like that cuz there's light before a sun" as it is to read Genesis as a modern science textbook like YEC'ers."

As the main person who has used the f*ck out of the sunlight argument, I just wanted to clarify that I don’t really think Genesis is meant to be read this way. I see it as ancient Hebrew storytelling of an ancient Babylonian story, and some local legends about the origin of the jewish people, that were compiled and tacked on to the Torah to set up the books of Moses. And as such, scientific or historical inaccuracy doesn’t really disqualify it.

This is why I always make sure I’m talking to a YEC’er before I go all hyper-literal on them. Since there is never any shortage of people around here arguing for a 6,000 year old earth, I bring it up probably more any one verse is called for (the one I’ve really gotten some mileage on is Numbers 31:17-18).

And while it may seem like a strawman to those with a more nuanced approach to the bible, most of my arguments are meant to debunk what is in my observation the much more commonly held view of the bible.

In my post-victory world, where no one takes the bible literally, the bible wouldn’t be completely discarded. There would still be a copy in every library, and anyone who wanted to read it could. The bible would continue to be read for what it can tell us about the people and cultures that produced the bible, and not what people think it can tell us about god.

In my opinion, having the more intelligent and productive of the two potential conversations is impossible unless you can get past a 6,000 year old earth (and even with OEC’ers there’s the question of whether they don’t take certain parts literally because of historical or textual analysis or because they don’t like certain parts).

I'm not trying to enjoy it.

EDIT: The only really annoying part is trying to write my elementary thoughts out coherently when I have so many thoughts and I'm terrible at writing coherently.

@Kodie,

The problem with reading the bible like any common idiot is that the context for reading and reader expectations will sometimes be false, and you will make the mistake such as those at AiG, who try to force modern genres onto ancient genres. In my mind it is as much an atheist mistake to read Genesis 1 and say, "Hey the world can't be created like that cuz there's light before a sun" as it is to read Genesis as a modern science textbook like YEC'ers. It is ancient myth, and it is valuable to know what setting that saga is being expressed in to recognize its function.

The year I became a christian (way back in high-school, 1982) I had a huge group of friends and a couple of coaches who were born again. They had these chick-tracks scattered throughout the pool office and would go to christian rock concerts on the weekends. I was intrigued, so I snuck the KJV bible out of our bookcase at home and tried to read the bible to see what it had to say. Well, of course, when you start in Genesis and try to read straight through--you don't get any kind of evangelical picture of god. I think I quit reading somewhere in Leviticus.

I then had to be spoon-fed various verses that had been cherry-picked out of the New Testament in order to come to "know" god. I find it pretty absurd that the supposed god of the universe would choose copies of copies of copies of a confusing bunch pieces of ancient texts to communicate his supposedly uber-important message to mankind. I think it's especially telling that the lay-person cannot come to this "divinely inspired" book by themselves and glean god's hugely important message. Instead, people have to be spoon-fed certain verses and told how they should be interpreted. It's all so clearly bunk now.

@Agathos - I want to read the bible like any common idiot, though.

Damn, you're right. I hate it when I know one of the options is a common wrong answer, and somehow I get them reversed.

@JonJon,

It's 'Revelation'. Highlander voice: there can be only one!!!

@Kodie,

Get a secular intro to the OT. Following the history of the Second Temple will make sense of some of the polemic in Persian era texts, of which Genesis is one, which means 5th cent BCE. Completely changes the way you read and observe what is happening functionally in the texts.

Answers in Leviticus sounds like an excellent idea! I love parody, especially when it is done well.

Yes, but one of the fundamental premises of AiG is that everything that is wrong in America:government, the ghays, women not in the kitchen, idiotic bullshit ad nauseum, etc. can be cured by reading Genesis more literally. They take every issue political, social, ideological and attempt to solve it by a more literal reading of Genesis.

On the one hand it makes sense from an organizational viewpoint, I mean if you style yourself AiG the more questions that can be solved the better, but on the other, as I am sure many here are aware, it takes a fantastic amount of willful ignorance, stupidity,and stunning leaps in logic. And in my world parodying those sorts of persons can be quite fun! And using Leviticus would be instructive.

@Answers in Leviticus

They could evade the whole thing by saying, "That's why you should accept jesus to be forgiven of all those sins."

@Agathos

I've always thought it would be fun to start a joke site "Answers in Leviticus" and operate it under the same premise as AiG, and declare everyone a sinner in danger of hell if they don't begin reading Leviticus more literally.

Leviticus literalists are out there, you know them as fundie orthodox jews. The amount of energy wasted on lengthy discussions about some of the minute details could have, if applied toward something useful, power the whole world for years.

@Ebon,

I've always thought it would be fun to start a joke site "Answers in Leviticus" and operate it under the same premise as AiG, and declare everyone a sinner in danger of hell if they don't begin reading Leviticus more literally.

I remember Leviticus being rather entertaining. It's basically all the commandments, including whose "nakedness you should not uncover" (I assume they mean "should not have sex with", or bathing the old, sick and babies is going to get really awkward!), how long a woman has to avoid men when she's on her period and after, how leprosy spreads in cloth (leprosy is surprisingly hard to catch. You can live with a leper your entire life and never catch it. Leprous in the bible seems to be a catch all term for "disease we don't understand"- woe betide any man who goes bald and reveals a birthmark on his head, poor sod might be declared uncleeeeeeeeeaannn!!!), eating sea creatures without fins and scales is baaaaaad, eating things that chew cud but don't have hooves is baaaaad, and men shouldn't sleep with men, or animals or other people's wives, or your own wife if she's "in her menstrual uncleanness" because the last time people did these things the land spat out the dead (and presumably moles, snakes, scorpions, ants and anything else that lives underground.) It doesn't say if the dead then got up and started eating everyone's brains. Given how often men fuck men, ladies fuck ladies, people fuck horses and have sexy funtimes even when a woman is on the blob, we should be in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. Hell, a massively inconvenient graveyard crisis at the very least.

I was really getting into it before I left!

Another issue I have is that I seem to have a very short, compared to other people, limit on the word count I can reply and possibly that I can even initially post, although I seem to be able to get in a longer first post than replies. It's very frustrating.

"2)On Monday after fencing, I was driving home and went, "Ugh! I have to read the bible when I get home." So I fucked off and didn't read any of it."

haha, thanks for the laugh Kodie!

I was mostly interested what had happened prior to Noah, and it turned out not to be a lot. I also wanted to find out what happened after Noah. Not so interested in the technical aspects of whether there was a flood or not, or whether animals might fit on such a boat. I think we've been over that.

Right now, just doing Genesis. I might break it up into a few threads, well, definitely more than one post, but I don't know if I should further divide topics like a total ass, or if it's better one thread to overlap comments over any of the stories one wants to comment about. The other problem is I come up with questions myself and not just catching inconsistencies, and a little bit more summing up what happened as far as I can tell than is probably necessary, but that helps me anyway.

Can I recommend something? Don't go all the way through from beginning to end. If you wanna read about Noah, go read about Noah. Find the parts you're interested in, or want to poke holes in, or want to know more about, or the parts where something exciting happens.

For what it's worth, my strong recommendations are: Ecclesiastes, Judges, both the Samuels, Jonah, John, and James. And maybe Hebrews. If you want the wacky stuff, skip to Ezekiel (Revelations is pretty nuts too). If you want to see poetry, you could do worse than the Psalms. If you're interested in the creation accounts or the flood to the exclusion of all else, stay in Genesis. These are all cool stories. They really aren't meant to be read in a row; you can do it, it's just a drag. You're already engaging with a text you think is likely to be unrewarding. No reason to make it harder on yourself.