Oldest Known Fragment of the New Testament Found

Discussion in 'The Red Room' started by Tuckerfan, Jan 23, 2015.

  1. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    A cautionary tale.
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  2. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    I'd buy a copy. :yes:
  3. garamet

    garamet "The whole world is watching."

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    'cause here's the thing: If it's a memoir, I've had a bit of experience and I'd be paid a flat fee upfront, so I might take that on.

    As fiction, though, Dayton's character would come across only slightly less unappealing than Eco's Simone Simonini, and that wouldn't work for me.

    As for an exposé, that might work during Dayton's presidential campaign, but not now.
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  4. Quincunx

    Quincunx anti-anti-establishment Staff Member Administrator

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    A ghostwritten memoir is a good way to jump-start a political career. Just saying. :?:
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  5. garamet

    garamet "The whole world is watching."

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    Sure, if you've got the $ to fund it out of pocket. No house will consider Dayton Who? a viable project.
    Last edited: Jan 28, 2015
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  6. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    It would be like the complete opposite of Forrest Gump, aside from the retarded part.
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  7. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Of course, its also possible that I'll have a three way with Taylor Swift and Emily Bett Rickards, but we all know the odds of that happening are effectively nil.
    I want to you to think of this as a military exercise. You know, like when Xenophon and the 10,000 made their way back home. Or Chairman Mao's Long march. (They covered 6,000 miles in a year!) I want you to think about the logistics of that large of a group (formed into a line, ten abreast, which stretches for 150 miles) having to walk some 300 miles to get from Egypt to Israel. God takes care of the food, water, and navigation. All you have to do is deal with getting people up, breaking camp, dismantling the Tabernacle, moving across the desert, stopping for meals (if you do), dealing with the sick and injured, making camp at the end of the day, re-erecting the Tabernacle, and repeating the process all over again. For forty years. How'd they do it?

    Which raises a number of questions, don't you think? For starters, let's say you're a good Jew in that group. While the others worship the Golden Calf or refuse to be circumcised, you do everything God tells you. Yet, like all the other assholes who can't be bothered to follow God's law, you're stuck wandering around in the desert for the better portion of your life. How does that make you feel?

    When you've done that, I want you to think about it from God's perspective. You know ahead of time that the people you've selected to be your "Chosen People," are going to do nothing more than spend the bulk of 40 years, bitching and moaning about what they're having to endure. This is despite the fact that you released them from centuries of slavery. You also know that you've had to drown millions of them in the past because they were so unruly. You have infinite power at your grasp, what do you do? March them out in the desert? Wipe out the worst of the lot, and put the survivors on the fast track to the "Promised Land"? Say, "Screw it!" and wipe everyone out and start again? What?

    Unless you're reading the original documents, you can't really infer that sort of thing from the texts. No matter how good a translation is, its still going to be inaccurate at conveying what the original says.

    Oh, and no, I don't expect that if you do these things, it'll change your beliefs. At all. I just want to see what you're capable of. Can you think in a manner greater than what you've demonstrated here? You want to go into politics, dealing with logistics like moving large numbers of people hundreds of miles is something you might have to deal with if you hold elected office. If you want to earn the trust and loyalty of people under you, as well as remaining popular with your constituents, you need to demonstrate a level of thinking which shows you can see things from more than one perspective, and you can illustrate that you do, as Bill Clinton claimed, "feel your pain."
  8. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    It seems to me that it wasn't until the coming of Christ that God considered individual salvation paramount.

    In the Old Testament era it seems God had the attitude of "one player jumps off sides, you penalize the whole team".
  9. garamet

    garamet "The whole world is watching."

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    So your God changed his mind. This just keeps getting better and better...
  10. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    You've rejected the Bible, now reject the rest.

    Join me in the dark side!!

    [​IMG]
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  11. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    None of which answers my questions. You are a good Jew, how do you feel about it?

    Answer the questions, Dayton. Don't bob and weave and try to deflect. How would you get 3 million people across 300 miles of desert in 40 years? How would you feel about being a good Jew and being denied entry into the Promised Land for 40 years? How would you handle things if you were God? That's what I want to know, not your guesses as to what the book might mean. I'm well versed in what the Bible says, I want to know how you'd handle the scenarios. We've got God's answers, I want yours.
  12. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    I have no idea how a good Jew (or anyone else) would feel. I don't personalize things by saying "if it were me".

    My interpretation:

    1) Humanity was generally a failure at doing what it should both before and after the flood.
    2) God promised never to destroy all humanity as he did in the flood again.
    3) Regardless of how the Jews crapped out when it came to following God, God stuck with them because of his earlier promise to Abraham.

    That's one reason.

    4) If you are familiar with the Old Testament, it seems the people living in Canaan at the time the Jews were brought there were WORSE than disobedient Jews by a wide margin. Thus God used the flawed people he had made a promise to in order to cleanse Canaan of its horrendously bad inhabitants.

    5) God frequently uses sinners, completely evil people and secular authorities to bring his will into reality. Nothing wrong with this. If you have snakes, let them kill the rats. Then kill the snakes.

    6) I'm not God nor do I aspire to be.
  13. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    Beings created in God's image failing at things.
    I don't even need a snarky punchline I just have to underline this shit.
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  14. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    How so? Because they settled in the wrong place?
  15. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    You should try it. Role playing can be quite fun. One of the reasons why Patton read Rommel's book was so he could understand how Rommel thought.

    :facepalm: God promised never to flood the world again. He is most certainly going to destroy it, assuming you believe Revelation.
    Yet, even the Bible admits that God turned His back on Israel at times.

    IOW, God opted for genocide. Again. He could have simply made the Canaanites vanish.

    Except we're not talking about snakes and rats, we're talking about human beings. The snakes, at least, kill the rats for food.

    Yet, you speak of a willingness, were you to be elected President, to send men and women into battle to die. One of the powers of God is to command others to kill on His behalf, is it not? Certainly, the term "playing God" is used to describe those who take it upon themselves to decide who lives and who dies.

    Still waiting for you to answer my questions about how you'd handle moving the Jews from Egypt to Israel.
  16. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    IIRC, they had moral practices that were extremely abhorrent to God. Including child sacrifice.
  17. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    You mean like what Jephthah did?
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  18. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    Hardly the same and no I'm not going to explain so do not bother asking. A Christian doesn't owe an atheist explanations.
  19. oldfella1962

    oldfella1962 the only real finish line

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    WTF? Didn't god tell Abraham (or one of those bible heroes) to sacrifice his kid but then chilled out once he
    realized he was actually willing to do it? Sorry - killing your kid is a crime against nature.
    Even animals know better than that.
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  20. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    IIRC, the followers of Baal sacrificed infants for something as inane as a powerless false god.
  21. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    And Lot offering his daughters up to be raped by an entire city. (Daughters who later went on to have sex with their father.)
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  22. Man Afraid of his Shoes

    Man Afraid of his Shoes كافر

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    I'm Episcopalian. So...

    A. Explain how it is not the same. I demand it as a Christian.

    B. Give me examples of Canaanites doing it.
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  23. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Yet, your God saw no way of redeeming humanity, other than flooding the Earth and drowning any number of infants because of things their parents had done. Why couldn't he have killed just their parents? Then there's all the women who were pregnant with children who died. What had those fetuses ever done to deserve to be killed?
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  24. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    How is it not the same? Didn't God stop Abraham from killing Isaac by telling him he was fucking with and wanted to see if he actually would? And since God is all knowing did he not know that Jephthah's daughter would be the first one out, where he could have stopped Jephthah from killing her?

    This again shows that God is either infallible or not all knowing, or even both.
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  25. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    Ask him.
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  26. Dayton Kitchens

    Dayton Kitchens Banned

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    Which God never commanded or endorsed in any way.
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  27. ed629

    ed629 Morally Inept Banned

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    I've always thought that was all kinds of fucked up. What kind of would allow someone's daughters to get gang raped to protect strangers. They supposedly were angels, but shouldn't a compassionate and caring god step in and say "Yo, dude... I was testing you. And it was admittedly a fucked up test, but yeah you shown your dedication. So here's your daughters, they're fine. Even though you were willing to let them get the shaft (literally) I didn't."
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  28. gturner

    gturner Banned

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    The God in the flood story is a rewrite of the Sumerian gods Enlil and Enki. Enlil, king of the gods, got angry at man because we made too much noise, and decided to wipe us out with a great flood. He'd tried to kill man before with droughts, famines, and plagues, but Enki thwarted those attempts by telling man how to survive each disaster. Acting on his own once again, Enki warned "Noah" about the coming flood and told him to build a boat, and to take two of every bird and animal. So the boat was built, the flood came, and as the waters receded "Noah" sent out birds to find land, which a dove finally succeeded at.

    Enki was the Sumerian god of seawater, freshwater, underground water, and creation, and his cult spread to the Canaanites and Hittites. His name was also written numerically as "40". Being the god of "underground" waters (the Sumerians thought there were vast freshwater oceans under our feet), both the Sumerian story, Bible, and Koran all say that the waters fell down from the heavens and surged up from under the Earth. That was Enki, doin' his thing.

    Then after the flood, Enlil was really angry, but Enki reasoned with him, holding that the guiltless shouldn't be killed. In changing the story into a monotheistic version, the war of wills between the two gods has to go out the window, making the story rather senseless. If God was so angry at man that he was willing to commit mass genocide, why save just the one family? Afterwards, why promise to never do it again, because a truly omniscient god would have already known not to wipe humans out in a flood before he did it. The monotheistic version has to portray God as making a colossal fuck up, for which he is eternally sorry. Nor does it make any sense that he had Noah bring two of every animal on board, because God had created all the animals from nothing earlier in that very same scroll. Screw saving the animals, he can just make new ones.

    In the Sumerian version, the animals are important because Enki is sabotaging Enlil's plan to wipe everything out, and getting a human to build a boat to smuggle them to safety is both straightforward and logical, as Enki has to deal with Enlil (his half-brother) and was keeping his scheme a secret. In the Biblical version, why didn't God just give Noah a ship? It wasn't like he had to hide from anyone or do anything on the sly like Enki was. The original version is pretty cool. The Hebrew version doesn't really work at all.
  29. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    Yet He still allowed Lot and the rest of his family to escape the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. A city which God was more than willing to wipe out everyone until asked to give at least one person a chance to prove that they were "good."
  30. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    He won't return my calls for some reason.