Is It Really About the Age of the Earth?

@sree251 says Speak for yourself. Stop trying to fit everyone else into your narrowminded compartments.

there are a LOT more ways for the mind to address information than just belief and unbelief. Your attempts to cast all thinking into those two narrow containers is another of your preconceptions; perhaps your most limiting one.

That talk is at least as old as the Book of Revelations, LOL!!!

@ElwoodBlues
My narrow-minded compartments? The entirety of human knowledge and thought are in narrow-minded compartments. We pigeonhole everything. Just take a look at the forum topics (e.g. people & family, power & politics, etc.) and sub-topics (e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

Which pigeon-hole do you fit in? Do you know that I could feed all your posts into a computer program and have AI construct "ElwoodBlues" the way IBM created "Deep Blue"? Your AI counterpart could log on to chat with folks here and no one would be able to tell the difference. AI can never copy my mental pattern.


There are no "unbeliefs". Everything is a matter of belief be it science or spirituality. This is because that is the way the mind works. The mind stores beliefs in the form of knowledge in various compartments. When I ask you a question, it triggers an "ElwoodBlues" response pattern that spits out an answer drawn from your various knowledge compartments.


Seems like you can't process the gravity of my statement.

@ArishMell
Wrong, it's God's definition like it says in His Word.

@GodSpeed63 Sorry but you are still defining your own beliefs.

That is not defining "religion" in any open manner, only your own religious beliefs although I accept many regard their own religion's scriptures as divine words.

The world is full of people following all manner of faiths, denominations, interpretations and none. Each belief being as true to its own, sincere followers as yours are to you.

@JimboSaturn Beat me to it Jimbo, yes he is Australian.

@ElwoodBlues
How do you know? Were you there when it happened?

@GodSpeed63 You continue to divert and distract in an effort to duck the "four corners of the earth" question. You keep ducking, but I'm gonna keep asking it.

Are you really gonna argue that the Earth has four corners? Or will you continue to duck the question??

@GodSpeed63
Were you ?
Natural law and physics are constant. It would take a Hell of a lot of effort to stop the sun in the sky, without disrupting the rest of the conditions.
Such an event would leave physical evidence. Do you have any showing that the event happened or do you just have an old book of fairytales?

@SDavis
Why?


Belief follows truth and not the other way around. Jesus told us that we must be born again in order to see the kingdom of God, we must born of water and of the Spirit in order to enter therein. There's only one interpretation of God's Word and that belongs to Him and to whom He wishes to share it with. People have a right to believe what they wish but are responsible to believe in the truth of God rather than the lie of Satan.

@GodSpeed63 I've already told you why and if you didn't understand it that's your b i z.


you're indirectly saying that if a person believes other than you do they are believing in the LIE of Satan well I put that same theory back at you.

One on one you can attack me with your personal beliefs and accuse me of believing a lie that's your business. Now prove to me that God hasn't directed my beliefs to the truth concerning the age of the Earth / the misinterpretations of the meaning of ancient Hebrew words. That you are the one believing a lie / a lie, the LIE of Satan passed down from generation to generation. As it is written in Daniel's 12 and the last days knowledge shall increase and knowledge is a gift from God.

Conversation has ended on my part goodbye

@SDavis
You got it wrong, sister, that's not what I'm saying. As a matter of fact, you answered my earlier question, you're not born again. What I believe is not personal but the Truth as God's directs. The Truth I believe belongs to everyone who accepts it. If what I believe doesn't line up with the Word of God, then I must change it so it will line up with His Word.

@JimboSaturn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_Nobel_laureates

@JimboSaturn No they were over 65% from Christian families. God will bless our children for a thousand generations he says if we love Jesus, yep! Now you know

@LadyGrace Space is a hoax Ma'am, all invented by NASA in 1878 to fool people into believing in dinosaurs.

@ArishMell
I think it should be noted, that Ham is not as ignorant as he appears to be. While of course nothing he says can be taken at face value, he has run a successful business for years ( thanks to the gullible) and while it didn’t work out, his ploy to cheat Kentucky out of the tax money was on the slick side.
To be that successful, you have to know enough of the real facts to make a convincing argument. Ham knows enough of the science , but he’ll never admit to it. Not when he can milk it for all it’s worth.

@DocSavage That is two different questions.

The Creation myth is purely allegorical, about Nature not human relationships.

The moral matters are purely about human relationships and behaviour.

@ArishMell
The issue of morality has nothing to do with the true age of the earth. He’s just using it as an excuse to try and validate the Old Testament.
Ham takes the bible literally, despite all the evidence against it. Godspeed63 is a mindless drone , void of original thought. You won’t see any feedback from him.

@JimboSaturn
Standard creationist excuse is to bring up test in which carbon dating didn’t work. They’re used to calibrate the system. But you’re not supposed to know that.

@GodSpeed63 It's not a binay choice like that.

It is a mixture of possibly true, or at least based on true, semi-historical and biographical tales, statements of religious belief, and outright myths, but at least the latter were included to make a theological point. So the myths should be seen as parables, not merely "fairy stories" - at least I don't call God "the sky-fairy" as some on this august site do!.

Some fables we can see as pretty obviously absurd of course, but we have to be careful. We cannot think for people living in a fairly small area of what we now call the 'Middle East' 4000 and more years ago, and even the wildest tales might have seemed credible to those people, for whom they were really written. They were not written for whoever might be around in the Great Wide World in some incomprehensible future. After all, we cannot write now, for those who might be around in 5024.

Also much of contents has probably suffered from centuries of inaccurate translating and interpreting. I expect often by simply not knowing alternative meanings of words; but some might have been deliberate to fit the require dogma. Short of going back to the original books, if any survive, it is hard to know, some three to four millenia later. And what of the works not included - the so-called "Apocrypha"?

Other accounts cover the ancient Hebrews' own history and biographies as they saw them, so how accurate they really are is another matter. The chronology is probably all guessed at for a start. I don't think societies in the Bronze Age as theirs was, were too worried about counting years although as early agrarians, they did live by the seasons. They appeared to have marked longer time by generations - Fred son of Charlie son of... etc. I don't know their average life-span and their generations might have been shorter than our rough average of around twenty-five years.

Then there are the fully theological bits, the ones I find more credible, because they define the deity and how they saw it. This includes the Ten Commandments, but I don't believe in the original clay tablets having any mystical origin. It was easy and handy for Moses, credited with collating them, to say they did!

It is impossible to know how the writers arrived at their texts; but the religion seems to contain elements of the Hebrews' Persian ancestors who used the much older Zoroastrian faith. That was the major Persian system then, still exists and, I was surprised to learn, is respected in its home country (now the Islamic Republic of Iran) but is now very much a minority belief.

.

The one Christian denomination that is thought, or it thinks itself, to follow the original Christian (new Testament) ideology is the Coptic Church, still clinging on in Egypt and a few other places. Despite persecution by followers of other faiths who cannot tolerate the existence of beliefs other than their own in the world. I do not know how it manages that, unless it has archives surviving from the 4th Century CE, when Christianity was formally developed from what hitherto was a minor Jewish sect started by the Apostles and their ilk.

The Greek Orthodox might be quite close to original, but added masses of incense and ceremony of its own, as did the Church of Rome. Jesus, and the Apostles, never needed all that perfume, robes and glitter!

...

It is easy to see how Judaism and its Christian off-shoot might have caught on in the surrounding Mediterranean lands, because most of the other religions of the time were based on fancy soap-opera pantheons who seemed only to demand lots of service from humans while giving little in return. Whereas the Abrahamic system offered a single, ineffable, unknowable god - God - that creates everything natural including we humans, and though rather demanding, cared about it all down to individual level... Unless we misbehave of course, then He's full of Wrathfulness and Smiting! Allegedly.

The brutal suppression by the Romans might even have strengthened the resolve of followers of this upstart new faith, but it is very likely it would have stayed a minor Jewish sect had the Romans not eventually converted to it and spread it across their European empire. There, the indigenous peoples carried it on after the Romans had all gone home.

Some while later along came Islam... and no new religions have been invented since, only sects of existing ones.

@ArishMell
You didn't answer my question.

@GodSpeed63 I did.

I just did not give you the childishly simple answer you wanted.

You asked an "either / or" question about something that is not a single one-of-two-choices way.

The Bible is not "either/or" because it is a mixture or much-translated, much edited books from many authors over several centuries, including a priestly set or caste trying to form a cohesive society among a bunch of tribes of long ancestries the books try to pretend did not exist.

So some accounts are bald statements of that particular society's religious belief, some are at least based on that society's own history, some are that society's laws given a religious framework, some are fables or myths of unknown origins but included to make theological points.

@sree251 Sidestepping answers again. No real answers to any questions.

@JimboSaturn
You guys need to stay in the science forum and talk physics to your own kind. I am the police confronting bad actors messing up public space.

@sree251 nonsense

@GodSpeed63 Just like you to sloppily and childishly modified the comic so it doesn’t make sense.

Add on: Does your god appreciate lies and deceptions? Because you do both, but not very well.

@BlueSkyKing
It makes perfect sense. It's the Truth of God. God's Word never changes even though the wording may different.


From people like yourself, no. Ridiculing me will not change the fact that you believe in the lies of men rather than the Truth of God.

@GodSpeed63
The lies of man work. Science , biology, evolution, germ theory, atomic theory.
Gravity, astronomy, anthropology, physics , geography, all work, and they do it without god’s word. And all of them have testable evidence, make predictions, and produce results
When was the last time god published anything new and useful?

@ToddpicogramakaSatan 'Fraid not! :-)