Dayton3/Tracker/Dayton Kitchen’s Greatest Hits

The claims are highly substansiated. When your response to any issue with the text is to try to re-interpret things to reconcile with your pet doctrine you are not going to get anywhere near the truth of the matter.

I must say I do find it interesting that many of the same people who argue forcefully in the thread about gender identity that one ought to be courteous to those who are absolutely convinced that their reality is other than what physical evidence would suggest suddenly abandon that stance completely when the issue becomes one where they are convinced that what the person believes is not objectively true...

They are not. They are of the same nature as Turmp's "highly substantiated" claims that he won the popular vote and that more people attended his inauguration than Obama's. They are merely the opinion of those who don't want the Bible to be true.

Does it cause me any harm that a person who's visually a dude wants to be a lady?
Nope.

Does it cause me harm if a book written by people with voices in their heads says I need to be stoned to death because I don't believe the voices in their heads?
Yeah, it kinda does.

Sunsets can be verified with multiple witnesses, and photographs.
Not so much the parting of the Red Sea, or the corpses of Palestinian carpenters getting up and walking around.

I don't need "multiple witnesses and photographs" to know that the sun will set (or rise).

One of Dr. Robert Zubrin's characters in "First Landing" dramatically debunked reliance on that kind of "evidence".

Want has nothing whatever to do with it.
The universe is eventually going to run out of energy, and fizzle out.
So, even if we go with the theories of hippie crackpots, that ghosts are made of quantum fairy dust, even the ghosts are going to die, rendering afterlife meaningless.
Why would I WANT that to be true?
Do you really think I'm that nihilist?
You do, don't you?
Of course you do.
You have to.

If your were born blind, and no one told you about the sun, then how would you know?
Magic superpowers?

Chances are I would eventually wonder just where the warmth came from at certain times of the day when I faced a certain direction...

So, deduction, and not revelation and blind faith.
All righty then.

Which parts? I assumed that I was talking with a fairly knowledgeable person, based on our many past discussions here. But if you are confused about any aspects of where natural history conflicts with Genesis, please let me know and I can provide you the evidence.

The burden is not on me to "prove" you're wrong, any more than the burden is on you to prove that the thousands of other religions are wrong. The burden is entirely on you to prove that these things contained in the Bible are true, but you cannot do so without the classic fall-back of "I have faith."

Yes. That is irrelevant. A sunset is a defined term, commonly understood to be the time during Earth's rotation when the sun fades out over the horizon line. And that actually supports my stance. We used to believe that a sunset was literally the sun moving below the Earth's horizon line, but now we understand that it's actually the Earth that is moving. Genesis is very clear (except when it contradicts itself) on what was created on which days. We now know that Genesis is wrong. Why has Genesis not been updated to reflect our evolved understanding of nature? Why not simply move the order of operations around so that is in line with this understanding? What possible dogmatic reasons would you have to believe that plants were created before the sun?

I don't care if it's true. Some of it is. Do you consider the historical claims of the bible to be falsifiable at all?
What level of evidence would be required against a specific claim for you not to try and reinterpret it within the bounds of your inerrancy dogma?

And where people want to do that kind of thing, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

But you are totally wrong to believe that those people are basing their beliefs on the Bible. They may think so, but you have the right -- I would go so far as to say the obligation -- to point out that the Bible never, ever, gives Israel the mandate to apply that law to anyone else. (And that's beside the fact that, even in Israel, God very rarely required that penalty to be applied; if he had, there wouldn't have been very many people left in the country!)

So if someone actually believes the Bible (as opposed to believing what they want to believe about the Bible), they are no danger to you whatsoever. Outside of the "test case" of the theocracy God put in place in Israel to demonstrate that no law is ever going to make people better, no matter how big the "carrots" and "sticks" attached to it, God does not require anyone to obey his law. In fact, the New Testament makes it very clear that accepting God's law is purely voluntary. So no, if you look at what it actually says, the book does not say you need to be stoned for not believing it. And anyone who claims it does is just ignorant of its teachings.

That, in fact, is a large part of why I am such an unconditional supporter of the principle of separation of church and state. When the "church" has the power of law, the "church" is no longer conformed to the teachings of Jesus.

No, they cannot. They are an illusion.

The fact that you believe that the sun moves around the earth, and "sets" in the evening (when in fact science clearly shows us that all that has really happened is that the point where you are on earth has rotated far enough that the sun is no longer visible), shows that you are wrong. You stand condemned by your own words. You even think it can be "verified" that the sun sets, when science has long made it clear that the sun does not set. It is the earth that turns.

So you cannot be taken seriously, because you believe things that modern science has long shown to be false, and you should know better.

Shame on you!

*The sound of bagpipes fades in from the distance and gets louder as the True Scotsman marches through Async's post*

Kilometers O'Brien does.

He even says there is plenty of evidence to prove that.

What is it with Christians, and language semantics games?
You damned well know "a sunset", is the thing we call the sun's light hitting the daylight side of the Earth as cultural shorthand.
Do you really think the other side of the argument is just playing word games too, and we're just trying to define your sky fairy away?
You do, don't you?
Holy shit.

Then we shouldn't use the term. It is scientifically wrong, provably wrong, and when archeologists read what few scraps of our writing still exists a few thousand years from now, they will laugh about how ignorant people were in the 21st century, still believing the the sun turned around the earth.

Why do you hold the Bible to a different standard than yourself? Can you not back up your allegations by using consistent rules of interpretation? Why are common expressions, poetic language, and figures of speech all acceptable for you, but when texts from thousands of years ago, from a civilization we can't even identify (it is very obvious that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not the same literary style as the rest; they are necessarily based on records transmitted from some other society about which we know next to nothing, since we don't even know what society it is) use non-litteral language, you require that they be as precise as if they had been written by a modern Indo-European (with all that implies in terms of language structure and thinking pattens)?

So yes, sunsets are very pertinent to the subject. Unless you are willing to say that you have never used such an expression, because you know it is factually wrong, then you either have to admit that you are scientifically ignorant, or admit that non-litteral language indicates no such thing.

If a superior intelligence writes "THE BIG BOOK OF ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING", it ought to contain, oh, I dunno, a model of the solar system, a unit on germs, formulas for medicines that actually work, why it's good to wash your hands before food prep, why cancer happens, how sex actually works, what stars actually are, you know, stuff a 4th grader learns, and then build up to the juicy stuff like calculus and quantum gravity towards the end for the advanced kids.

What I wouldn't expect is a bunch of deliberately obfuscative horseshit parables that even the apostles were confused and annoyed by.
It's God, not the fucking Riddler.

You would have a valid point if, a few thousand years from now, people built a religion based around the term sunset and vehemently defended (i.e. to the death) any attempts to point out that's not technically true.

But as it stands, you do not have a valid point, and you are merely deflecting based on the weakness of your position. As I expected, the request that I provide the contradictory historical evidence was met with nothing but unrelated rambling on your part. You'd rather deflect and attempt to cast blame on me (very un-Christian), than to have an actual discussion about the historical inaccuracies in the Bible.

Because the Bible pretends to be something it's not. The Bible's followers pretend it to be something it's not. I do not have a global religion based around me. You are once again deflecting based on the weakness of your argument (or rather, a total lack of any coherent argument to be made).

See above. I am not pretending to be the definitive text on the creation of everything.

You continue to deflect. Next time just say you disagree and we can leave it at that, rather than wasting both of our times. I have provided you with ample evidence, and you have casually dismissed it based on semantics of the English language. I have no problem with you believing with what you believe based on faith, but don't sit here and pretend that it is based on anything but that.

People aren't flying airplanes into buildings over gender identity...

Next he's going to tell us that because Baked Alaska isn't really a chunk of baked dirt from Alaska, we're all lying like the Bible when we use that term.

Why do people think the Bible should've been written as an exhaustively thorough science and history book?

Was it written to give detailed scientific knowledge? No.

Was it written to give a detailed history of the world or even of God's chosen people? No.

It was written as a guide to reconcile sinful and fallen humanity with God.

Why can't people accept this?

As do you.

I don't know, ask its followers.

I'm one of them.

I don't expect it to be.

Neither do a bunch of "followers" that I know.

Because "Christians" pretend it does all these things.

How do you figure?

Because it's dumb.
It's a dumb plan.
You're created sick, and commanded to be well.
It'd be like if I built a shoddy robot, and left it with a manual to fix itself, but in limerick form.
The robot has to learn to decipher limericks, then continually fix itself, knowing sooner or later, it's going to break in a way that it won't be able to fix itself anymore, and then cease to function.
Also, the most breakable part of the robot is the part that stores the understanding of limericks.

Either God is a sick prankster, or the whole scenario is written by crappy human authors.
I go with choice B.
Occam's Razor.

Hey, it ain't us that need to be told this.