masonlandry

The odds of me being alive now are exactly the same as the odds of me being alive at any other possible time. Just like the odds of being dealt a hand of 4 aces is exactly the same as being dealt a hand of any random set of 4 cards. It only seems sp ciql because the outcome has significance to us. Personally. You would ask the same question no matter when you were alive.

Why does it matter to me? Because I'm experiencing it. The only other option is to commit suicide, and I have no wish to do that. Perhaps it is selfish, but that's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Usually, it's in my self-interest to bear other people in mind when I consider the consequences of my actions. It matters to me that the people I love care about me and are impacted what I do. I have no idea what my thoughts will be on my deathbed since I can't predict the future, but I'm not afraid of death or whatever comes after it, if anything.

I definitely hold doubt about all ancient history.

Did you read those? Specifically the second one. The first one says pretty much what you said it did, but the second one was decidedly on the side of it not being supported at all. From the link: "The reality is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt. Yes, there's the story contained within the bible itself, but that's not a remotely historically admissible source. I'm talking about real proof; archeological evidence, state records and primary sources. Of these, nothing exists."

I've never heard that evidence before. If that's legit I think that's exactly the kind of evidence I'd be looking for. Do you have any sources I can look at?

Yeah, they all die. What difference does that make? Does something have to last forever to matter to you? I've never felt that way. I'll gladly eat ice cream even though I know it will be finished pretty quickly. Doesn't mean I thought it was pointless to eat it. My life may be meaningless to the universe as a whole, but it sure matters a lot to me now.

The way I understand it, if the forefathers of the Hebrews believed the story of Moses to be true, they would go on telling t and eventually writing it down for generations, whether it started as a story they knew was legend or whether it actually happened, so it being repeated long enough for people to eventually believe it doesn't tell me much about what actually happened. I certainly believe the evidence is clear that Jews, for a very long time, have told the story of the Exodus. That doesn't tell me whether it actually happened, so for that I have to rely on external evidence. Jewish people would have been Jewish people whether they were enslaved mlby Egyptians or not, so it's not like "their people" would somehow dissipate if they didn't think the Exodus happened.

I'm here to talk about what's being talked about. I don't care if people believe or not. But if someone brings up an argument I think is wrong, I don't see any reason why I shouldnt say so, especially in a forum dedicated to science and religion. Morals, from an evolutionary perspective, evolved over millions of years just like everything else. There are ways to behave that are conducive to a social species, and ways that are not. And lots of areas in between. There are things you can do that are better for yourself, for your family, your community, and onward, and we see these things as moral. The better they are for everyone over time, the more moral. And the reverse, if something is bad for society, we consider it immoral, the more impact it has on the more people, the worse we consider it. No single person. Dictates what the "right" rules are. What a particular community sees as moral depends on how people demand other members of the community action, or else they don't get to be a part of it or they won't pass on the genes that predicate them to behave that way. This is the case whether the community is local, national, global, etc. The bigger the community, the fewer things we'll have in common. The closer and smaller the community, the more things they will have in common. That's why you see some basic moral understanding that pretty much everyone is clear on across time and across cultures, and so many variences in morals and ethics across the same.

What about the cases where it is actually discredited, like the story of Moses freeing slaves from Egypt and leading them through the wilderness. Jewish archaeologists have scoured the land for evidence that this happened, in the hopes of providing proof that the account is hirlstorically accurate, but instead found so much evidence to the contrary that they concluded that they can say they are sure beyond reasonable doubt that the Hebrews were never enslaved by the Egyptians.

Just want to add, this isn't even an atheist can point of evolution. It's a strawman of that too. Nothing about evolution necessitates that morals can't exist just because humans evolved from other primates. It also displays a lack of understanding of what fitness means in the context of evolution. Fitness means "fitted to the environment" and the environment includes everyone else who lives in the environment. Actions viewed as immoral make one evolutionary unfit because it makes you unlikely to be cooperated with, unlikely to get a mat to reproduce with, and unlikely to be allowed to live within society at all depending on how badly you behave. Humans are part of nature, and therefore a huge part of natural selection, even moreso because we can consciously decide what to select for.

I don't know why you thought I was setting a standard for prophecies. I was just making a distinction between literal details and symbolic or metaphorical.

I think I'm with you on everything but the last point, and maybe that's because I wasn't clear enough on what I meant. A literal prophecy would be something like, "In 1000 years, God will send his son, who will be called Emmanuel, to be born of a virgin in Bethlehem." When I say literal, I'm specifically talking about the prophecy. As in, if it isn't literally worded as "such and such thing will literally happen like this" the prophecy itself must be understood in some way other than literal in order for it to be a prophecy. So like, in Jeremiah 25:11 when it says Babylon will become a desolate wasteland and these nations will serve the King of Babylon for 70 years." That's clearly literal. The fulfillment of that prophecy would be the literal words coming true in the future. Perhaps foreshadowing has a different meaning in Biblical study and prophecy that I'm not aware of. What I know of foreshadowing is what I learned about it in school and studying literature, where something symbolically related points, as a sign, to something that will happen in the future. Not literally telling the audience that literally such and such will occur, and not the same thing happening twice. For example, a cloudy sky foreshadowing some event that causes the main character emotional turmoil in a novel. Is this different than what you are talking about?

I'm not really understanding the distinctions. That's not necessarily a problem with how you phrased it, but I think we both have different understandings of many of the words used there. One thing I'm not clear on is what you mean by "interpretation is objective." Because that seems to me like the exact opposite of what interpretation is. Also, I wouldn't say my position was that an allegory is a tool for interpreting. You don't use allegory to interpret, allegory would be the use of the author, and you as a reader would interpret the allegory and what it means. Also, it doesn't always teach morality. It can, but a broader definition is that it is a symbolic abstraction of a truth or generalization about human existence, moral or not. As far what a prophetic foreshadowing is, I'm completely lost there. I understand that people draw links between an event, usually one in the Old Testament, and another event in the New Testament. If these foreshadowings are not literally explained, how can you get to the point of understanding that one thing was prophesied by another unless you view the foreshadow as symbolic of the prophesied event? If the text doesn't explicitly say, you have to do some kind of non-literal interpreting to understand it to mean anything at all, right?

I was under the impression that an allegory is a symbolic representation. Something that foreshadows something else would be symbolic of it, would it not? If not through allegoric interpretation, where do you draw the link between the thing foreshadowed and what foreshadowed it?

The best I can do is say what I believe to be the truth. If I'm wrong, please correct me. If it upsets anyone, my apologies. That's all I've got to work with. But I'm unorthodox enough on my own to be putting my foot in dangerous water on any forum with a majority of orthodox believers. I can say though, while I have had good conversations with people who disagree with me, nobody has been unkind, so I'm quite happy with this forum.

Just wanted to point out, since I've been watching this side convo. This whole exchange is interesting because it stems from a disagreement about how literally to take the Bible and what is or isn't important. But a lot of the people who have a contention with one.opinion's allegorical reading of the creation account use allegorical understanding themselves in so much of the rest of the Bible, like to determine that Satan was animating the serpent or that the Sabbath is allegorical to Jesus as our rest from sin. It really seems like the only differences the two of you have are where to use an allegorical understanding and how to apply it.

What is interesting to me in the realm of distrusting scientists, is that you would only ever know if a scientist manipulated the data to force a biased outcome by exposing that manipulation through the scientific method. So the distrust of some science is predicated on the trust of the larger majority of science. Which, as has been said several times in this thread, is why peer review is so important. I think there are a myriad of problems within the scientific community and will continue to be as long as humans are the ones who make up the scientific community. Not only do you have to watch out for someone forging and manipulating data for personal gain, but the community constantly has to be wary of becoming too conservative or dogmatic that it refuses good evidence that implies a currently accepted understanding may be wrong. Ideally, and in principle, the goal of a scientist is always to learn what they are missing, not just to strengthen or justify a currently help viewpoint. But they are still humans, and humans don't like to be wrong, especially if they think their career rests on it. But accepting new evidence even when it turns a current hypothesis on its head is exactly how we come to a better understanding of the world we live in.

I can see why someone would think, in the time period during which the books of the Bible were written, the understanding of Earth was that of a flat disk, held up by pillars of earth, topped by a dome-shaped firmament that separated the rain waters from the waters on Earth, over which the angels draped the night sky. That was a common view of Earth in the Middle/Near East thousands of years ago, and it's completely understandable why they would have thought that way. If you stand out in a field, what you see around you is a circle of land that encompasses your vision, and until you master seamanship, the world as you know it is surrounded by water. Plus, if you don't have a comprehensive understanding of the water cycle and all you are working with is an observation that water is coming out of the water-colored sky, there would be some invisible solid barrier between the sky water and the ground water. It's a reasonable view to take just based on observations. That is a completely different issue than whether the Bible caused people who had better evidence and better tools to work with to ignore that evidence in favor of a flat-Earth view. Unless you could find evidence of churches (back when the church and the state were inseparable entities, especially) supporting a flat earth as doctrine for the majority of western history. By the way, I'm agreeing with you, just adding to what you already stated. Although, it does blow my mind that there has been a legitimate resurgence of flat-Earth believers in the era where you can literally watch the Earth on a live feed from the international space station on your computer.

Disclaimer that this is not something I could say I believe, but it's something I experienced, so I'll share about it. In the past, I've ingested a psychoactive tryptamine known as the spirit molecule, (which I don't condone using and wouldn't recommend) and it is known for inducing what can only be described as an out of body experience in what feels like a completely different dimension. On one of these occasions, I was in a place that was the closest thing to heaven I could imagine. I didn't have a body, I was just pure awareness with no material aspects at all. There were a lot of other...entities, I'll call them, but I suppose souls would do just as well, who were all singing. The sound they made was life-giving. It was so powerful it actually felt like I was hearing the frequencies that hold reality together, and it sounded like a chorus (no words, just sustained notes in a harmony of thousands of voices) creating glory and awe and praise out of pure sound. Two souls were on each side of me, and they flew me around this space, which also wasn't made up of any material things but had a substance of some kind completely foreign to me. As we "flew" around this place, like they were welcoming me and showing me around, I felt as if the emotions this song brought out were just bursting from where my chest would have been if I'd had a physical form, in a golden, glowing light. It was more powerful than anything I've felt in my life, so the closest thing I can use to describe it was like feeling on top of the world, victorious in the most profound sense, and I had the overwhelming sensation of finally being "home." I don't think I went to Heaven or anything, but every description of Heaven I've ever heard fit what happened to me. There wasn't some kind of kingly deity sitting on a throne, like I always envisioned a human-like version of God looking when I was a kid, but every iota of this place was like it was...in God. Made up of God. I don't know how to describe it, it was just too impossible to put into words and unlike anything you could experience in a 4-dimensional world. But the "substance" that held it all together, that was what I would say was representative of the creator if any part of that experience could be. Before that happened, I was pretty staunchly an atheist and I didn't believe in anything immaterial, but that changed my mind real quick. You can't experience something like that and not at least be open to the possibility that some things that exist are much, much more than atoms and physical energy.

I must be missing something because I don't see an argument here. Is your position that, because DNA consists of so many individual amino acids, that evolution cannot occur? I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise?

Honestly, the most common thing I encounter when theists (really, atheists too, for that matter) debate about evolution is that they don't really have any idea what it is or how it works. Even if you don't believe evolution happens, or if you are fine with evolution but don't believe that natural selection is what drives it, whatever your contention is, there is no point debating it if you don't know what you're arguing against. The statements I most commonly hear that put up a red flag that I'm talking to someone who doesn't understand evolution: 1.)" You think we came from goo! How can a bunch of chemicals turn into living things!?" This has nothing to do with evolution. This is a criticism of abiogenesis, which is an entirely separate claim. Absolutely feel free to contend with it, but that's not evolution. The theory of evolution by natural selection describes the mechanism by which living organisms diversify over time due to heredity and mutations. Evolution doesn't come into the picture until living things already exist. 2.) "Mutations can't add new information." Yes, they certainly can. The entirety of our DNA consists of only 4 amino acids in various pair combinations. If they are arranged in different ways, they code for different proteins, and this determines your entire biology. If one or more of the amino acids are altered at an allele, it will work differently than it did before, if it still works at all. There are only a handful of ways the mutations occur (translation, deletion, addition, etc.) and only 4 acids to work with, but there are countless combinations that can be created from these changes. If they can change in structure, they can change in output. 3.) "Microevolution happens but macroevolution doesn't happen" These are the exact same things, only over different periods of times. This is like saying minutes pass, but hours do not pass. The thing that makes up either one of these things in seconds, but if enough time goes on, minutes become hours. If you take issue with macroevolution, you must necessarily disagree with microevolution because the same process (change of a single organism) is what causes both. Or, if you are still okay with micro-evolution, you must at least not agree with the process by which it occurs. 4.) "I didn't come from an ape." You are an ape. Ape is a taxonomic classification, like a mammal. Saying you didn't come from an ape is exactly like saying you didn't come from a mammal. Perhaps you mean chimp or gorilla or some other specific species of primate. Even if you mean that nobody who believes in evolution believes humans descended from chimps or gorillas. The theory is that humans and chimps and other primates descended from a common ancestor who was also a primate but was not any of the currently living species. Also, I often see a misunderstanding of what speciation is. What constitutes a new species is when a population diverges and the genetic changes that accumulate as they adapt to different environments diverge so much that they no longer produce viable offspring when they mate. There is some grey-area between species and subspecies (like donkeys and horses, who can breed a hybrid mule that is almost always sterile, but in some cases can produce offspring.) But if two organism types cannot produce viable offspring, they are different species, no matter how similar they are. This matters when talking about examples of speciation being observed because it has been observed multiple times. If you have an objection to something else, you should figure out what to call it, because speciation is something observed relatively often in populations, especially lab-organisms that have short lifespans and breeding cycles. As for other issues commonly discussed when there is contention between science and religion, I often hear "you think we came from nothing?" This is a straw man, as most people who accept the Big Bang theory (which many theists do, as well) don't claim it came out of nothing. Most people I have ever heard discuss it doesn't claim anything about what caused the Big Bang, what happened "before" it (before is a weird word to use if time started at that point, but that's beyond my comprehension, so I'll use it anyway.) There seems to be a really common problem of people assuming that if you don't believe God did something, you must claim to know how it came to be, when plenty of times, that's not happening, and it totally derails any productive conversation. In most of these cases, the person who doesn't believe in God is happy to tell you they don't know what came before or caused the Big Bang (or whatever they think happened) and simply doesn't think the only options are "nothing" or "God was responsible." Personally, I'm of the mind that, if you are going to discuss something with someone who has a different perspective or background, you should always make an attempt to summarize their position, and ask them if you've accurately portrayed what they believe or what they are making a case for. If they say that you haven't gotten it right, just try and see where you're missing something instead of running ahead and arguing against something nobody actually believes.

Hi everyone. I just joined this club today, so I don't know exactly how this is done other than from what I read in the rules and the homepage. What I'm going to do is try to find something about each passage that is new or different than what I knew of it before, and I'll share it here. Something I found interesting about Luke 24:1-12 is that everyone seemed very surprised to find the tomb empty. This makes me wonder what they all thought when, before the crucifixion, they were told that Jesus would be sacrificed and rise after three days. The women who first entered the tomb were perplexed to find it empty, but when the angels reminded them what they had been told, they seemed to think "oh yeah, someone did mention that this man who we know performs miracles and is the Son of God would rise from the dead." I just wonder how they ever forgot that in the first place, and what we can learn from how easily they forgot (and how easily the apostles dismissed) what they appeared to believe when they were told it would happen but were so surprised when it actually did happen, save Peter, who immediately jumped up to see the tomb because he never forgot who Jesus was or what he would do. In Genesis 43, I thought about honesty, and what is at stake when we choose to tell the truth. Telling the truth often brings consequences, and sometimes terrible consequences. Israel knew that if Benjamin went with his brothers, he risked never seeing his son again. But when he asked Judah why he treated his father badly by telling the man they had another brother, Judah said they were asked outright, and so they told the truth. Even though lying may have seemed like it would bring about the fewest consequences, and might have seemed like the way to do right by their father, Joseph already knew the truth. The consequences of lying may have been far worse, and they may have not been able to return and get the food they needed to survive. And in the end, telling the truth led to the brothers all being reunited with their father, even though in the short term, Benjamin was detained and it brought Israel a lot of grief. Telling the truth is often the hardest thing to do in the moment, but it is the right thing to do every time, and the consequences of lying are almost always much worse, maybe not immediately, but eventually. Psalm 34 tells us that, even though nobody will be free of struggles, the way we can be sure that we will be redeemed from them is to seek God and to do right by God. If we are wicked and do evil, if we work in opposition to God, we will have no hope. What we can manage to do on our own will be all we get, and it won't be enough. If we act in accordance with God, we have the hope of grace and mercy, even when our heart is broken and our spirits are crushed. The Psalm is a good reminder that even if our lives are falling apart, the way forward is to walk with God, continuing to do the things we know to be right. Even if we feel hopeless, the alternative can only be to make things worse.