Fun fact: all of the oldest recorded stories - in addition to the Torah there’s the Sumerian writings that are even older - have a story of a worldwide flood event.
The caveat being that to them, the “world” that was flooded was the Mesopotamian basin area. In the millennia since then, the known world has grown to encompass the entire planet, so the context informing our interpretation has shifted, and we need to expend proper effort to shift it back, to what they would have meant back then, not what it would mean to us today if similar words had been used, e.g. if the story were told in English.
The children’s story myth seems to have arisen from an irl event, just not the one that the picture books repeatedly show & tell (obviously for reasons of profit, they sell what people will buy and enjoy looking at, rather than focusing on historical accuracy).
Here’s the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.
The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.
I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c “they made it up”, but b/c it actually did really happen… and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.
Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie “The Matrix” did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.
Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe “the world-wide flood event” to a child, it would be both “yes it actually did happen” (most likely) plus also “it wasn’t quite like that”.
I don’t think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.
Floods happen, sometimes big floods happen, humans tend to live near water, so when big floods happen lots of humans die. The stories grow by being retold, eventually you get the mother of all floods stories.
I don’t have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific. We have secular history and from there we can know what really happened. Now, the Bible is consistent on very little, homophobia is one of those things it is consistent on. The solution is not to be an apologist for the text. The solution is throw out that bronze age crap and be nice to the LGBT.
I did this crap when I was working my way out of religion and no one has to make the same mistakes I did. It wasn’t really slavery, it wasn’t really racism, it wasn’t really genocide, it wasn’t really homophobia, it wasn’t really oppression…rip the band-aid off! It was slavery, it was racism, it was homophobia, it was brutal oppression.
You don’t have to do anything, true. Feel free to completely disregard the Bible.
That being said, don’t pick up Lord of the Rings, ignore it’s genre and declare it pointless because Hobbits don’t exist. The Bible has so many genres, because its a collection of stories and books rather than a single book, and you probably aren’t aware of most of those genres because they no longer exist.
Again, feel free to completely ignore the Bible if you’d like, but saying that it’s a mistake for anyone to try and figure out what one of the most influential books in the history of mankind was originally intended to say is wrong.
Now you are muddling. There is a difference between studying the book as a piece of historical literature and saying it doesn’t say exactly what it says. If someone wants to waste as much time as I have doing that, they are welcome to. If someone wants to pretend it is NOT homophobic I will push back.
I don’t have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific
Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) *I* did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. *I* was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn’t (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? “I am right and you cannot question that!” - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?
Be better.
Anyway, it’s a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.
And fwiw, Jesus hung out with “sinners” (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to “love one another, especially those you disagree with” so… even if this thought bugs you, you are actually “following the teachings of Christ” (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don’t fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don’t fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to “be nice”, is it not?:-D)
I have debated with you before, and you were using Ehrman-level arguments to try and gymnastic your thoughts into believing that the Gospels were somehow not written by who they are attributed to. According to you, apologetics come to violence. On this platform I have seen people literally call for the wiping out of Christians, one even advocated wiping out all Christians, Jews and Muslims (that’s 4 billion people). If you want to use mental gymnastics to try and convince yourself that the Bible is somehow not real so you don’t have to worry about facing God, I won’t stop you. But it doesn’t make it any less real.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Jesus definitely existed, there are historical records of him and his crucifixion. The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable (by others, I don’t believe in space wizards except Jedi) but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
What’s super gross is you’re othering them based on their religion.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number.
Jesus definitely existed
Better tell these losers. Not a single one noticed his existence until after the Mark Gospel was written and widely published. Not a single shred of contemporary evidence, an inconsistent biography, a story that even removed supernatural events stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
there are historical records of him and his crucifixion.
Very well show me the contemporary record.
The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Which makes it even worse. They were good at it and yet the records for Jesus aren’t there. The first Roman official that even mentions the Christians was after they had been around for decades and he doesn’t even seem to know what rank Pilot had.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
See, you aren’t really interested in any intellectual argument. It’s a heart issue. You think you know better than God and want to be your own God. Hence the deconversion.
Thallus (b. 52AD) might have wrote about a darkness and earthquake happening when Jesus was crucified.
Pliny the Younger (b. 61AD) testified to Jesus and talked how His followers thought He is God, and how they worshipped Him.
Phlegon (b. 80AD) likely confirmed the darkness and Jesus predicting the fall of the temple, also confirmed the crucifixion and resurrection
Celsus (b. 175AD) confirmed Jesus had powers and that He was believed to be born of a virgin
Flavius Josephus (b. 37ad) confirmed He existed also and was reportedly resurrected.
The Jewish Talmud confirmed Jesus existed and was crucified, although came 400 years after the fact.
Then there’s the entire Isaiah 53 prophecy we have from 700 years before Christ, the earliest copy being from 100 years before.
Who has believed what he has heard from us?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief;
when his soul makes an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many,
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,
because he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and makes intercession for the transgressors.
Then of course you have the New Testament on top of that.
This is more evidence than we have for other historical figures from around that time. Salvation is a free gift. It’s up to you whether or not you believe in it and accept the reality that God is real, that He really came down as man, died, then rose again.
Of course, people will sooner believe that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and that Christmas is originally pagan, both claims with no evidence, than this.
Wait… sorry… you’re actually claiming that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were actually written by those people as named in those gospels?
Fun fact: all of the oldest recorded stories - in addition to the Torah there’s the Sumerian writings that are even older - have a story of a worldwide flood event.
The caveat being that to them, the “world” that was flooded was the Mesopotamian basin area. In the millennia since then, the known world has grown to encompass the entire planet, so the context informing our interpretation has shifted, and we need to expend proper effort to shift it back, to what they would have meant back then, not what it would mean to us today if similar words had been used, e.g. if the story were told in English.
The children’s story myth seems to have arisen from an irl event, just not the one that the picture books repeatedly show & tell (obviously for reasons of profit, they sell what people will buy and enjoy looking at, rather than focusing on historical accuracy).
Here’s the thing, society formed around agrarian settlements. What do you need for crops, livestock, AND people? What makes transporting your goods easier? If you said water, you get a prize. Many of our settlements, both modern and historic, were near water sources. Water sources flood. Inevitably, water sources experience thousand-year flood events, and completely swamp a huge area, maybe even wiping out one or more settlements. As you start going back in history, you also start dealing with glacial dam rupture events, which also almost certainly scoured away everything downstream and would have seemingly come out of nowhere at all.
The phenomenon of the global flood myth is really just that people live near water, and when you live near water, shit happens.
Upvoting, b/c that too:-).
I was just hyper-focusing on how that particular event, shared by other cultures in that identical region, told that same story about it, not b/c “they made it up”, but b/c it actually did really happen… and yet, at the same time, looks nothing at all like the picture books, which have pictures of like Toucans and such that those people likely never saw in their entire lives, but I guess enhance the sales of the picture book and thus that exists now.
Ofc there are other possibilities too - perhaps the story of the ark refers to a spaceship that emigrated humans from elsewhere, originally. Stargate: Atlantis (spin-off series from Stargate SG-1) explored that thought, as did the 2009 movie “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage:-D. I guess you could argue that the movie “The Matrix” did as well - the ark being far more figurative in that one, but where people + their surroundings were taken elsewhere after dying off in the original location.
Truth sure is stranger than Fiction:-) - and correspondingly, much harder to describe. So like if we had to describe “the world-wide flood event” to a child, it would be both “yes it actually did happen” (most likely) plus also “it wasn’t quite like that”.
I don’t think you have to even assume that every Mesopotamian flood myth is referring to the same event. The Tigris and Euphrates were very prone to massive flooding.
Yes. I mentioned it as “supporting evidence”, but good clarification.
No we don’t have to do that, not at all.
Floods happen, sometimes big floods happen, humans tend to live near water, so when big floods happen lots of humans die. The stories grow by being retold, eventually you get the mother of all floods stories.
I don’t have to go through the Bible and try to salvage it. Arguing that this part is literal this part is analogy this part is metaphor this part is context specific. We have secular history and from there we can know what really happened. Now, the Bible is consistent on very little, homophobia is one of those things it is consistent on. The solution is not to be an apologist for the text. The solution is throw out that bronze age crap and be nice to the LGBT.
I did this crap when I was working my way out of religion and no one has to make the same mistakes I did. It wasn’t really slavery, it wasn’t really racism, it wasn’t really genocide, it wasn’t really homophobia, it wasn’t really oppression…rip the band-aid off! It was slavery, it was racism, it was homophobia, it was brutal oppression.
You don’t have to do anything, true. Feel free to completely disregard the Bible.
That being said, don’t pick up Lord of the Rings, ignore it’s genre and declare it pointless because Hobbits don’t exist. The Bible has so many genres, because its a collection of stories and books rather than a single book, and you probably aren’t aware of most of those genres because they no longer exist.
Again, feel free to completely ignore the Bible if you’d like, but saying that it’s a mistake for anyone to try and figure out what one of the most influential books in the history of mankind was originally intended to say is wrong.
Now you are muddling. There is a difference between studying the book as a piece of historical literature and saying it doesn’t say exactly what it says. If someone wants to waste as much time as I have doing that, they are welcome to. If someone wants to pretend it is NOT homophobic I will push back.
Allow me to be unnecessarily aggressive here, for the lolz obvi, by stating that yes, you do.:-) *I* did not make this comic, you were the one who chose to show it. *I* was not the one who started this conversation, you were. If you start something, then you need to be intellectually honest about whatever it is that you choose to discuss? Or else you, who has your rights, may get downvoted and talked back to by others, who likewise have their rights as well. Bury your head in the sand all you wish - and congrats btw for overcoming your false religious start in life - but if you are going to poke your head up and demand that your POV be considered by everyone who reads your posts on Lemmy, then by that self-same action you are choosing for it to be evaluated as well? That isn’t (just) me, it is the very nature of logic and reality that demands that! Otherwise, how is your POV any different than theirs? “I am right and you cannot question that!” - really?, that is the route that you want to go with here?
Be better.
Anyway, it’s a thought. Do what you want with it:-D.
And fwiw, Jesus hung out with “sinners” (literal prostitutes and stuff), and literally commanded (anyone who wants to claim to follow Him as a literal God) to “love one another, especially those you disagree with” so… even if this thought bugs you, you are actually “following the teachings of Christ” (heavy emphasis on that word teachings) more closely than the actual genocidal Christians who (mis-)use the other words in the same book to bludgeon people to (literal) death. Anyway, don’t fall down to their standards - I encourage you: choose to be better my fellow human being!:-) Don’t fall back into old patterns, just now on the other side! :-P (even if, as Jesus Himself literally has preemptively agreed with you, it may happen to be the correct one, at least insofar that regardless of what someone else chooses to do or not do, it is no reason to be ungentle with them, as you say it is better to “be nice”, is it not?:-D)
Did chatgpt get messed up again?
Brilliant rebuttal. Won’t make your vile children stories correct however.
Apologetics only comes in a few basic forms
The disproven
Convoluted versions of the disproven
Violence and mockery
I have debated with you before, and you were using Ehrman-level arguments to try and gymnastic your thoughts into believing that the Gospels were somehow not written by who they are attributed to. According to you, apologetics come to violence. On this platform I have seen people literally call for the wiping out of Christians, one even advocated wiping out all Christians, Jews and Muslims (that’s 4 billion people). If you want to use mental gymnastics to try and convince yourself that the Bible is somehow not real so you don’t have to worry about facing God, I won’t stop you. But it doesn’t make it any less real.
“debate” is not how I would describe whatever it is you think you are doing.
Of course the Bible is real. It is as real as any other work of fiction. Batman and Jesus are equally real in sense that people can talk about them.
There is no god and you are not a fucking mind-reader.
Don’t need your permission, Christian. Your lot ain’t running things anymore. Can’t exactly burn me at the stake.
Sorry not sorry that Jesus never existed and you are wasting your life on a 20 century old con.
You’re kinda being a dick about it though, honestly.
Jesus definitely existed, there are historical records of him and his crucifixion. The Romans were good at records and government and shit.
Whether he was a mystical being, debatable (by others, I don’t believe in space wizards except Jedi) but frankly your approach here is just as vile as the dude you’re arguing with.
What’s super gross is you’re othering them based on their religion.
Yeah yeah I suck, get in line and take a number.
Better tell these losers. Not a single one noticed his existence until after the Mark Gospel was written and widely published. Not a single shred of contemporary evidence, an inconsistent biography, a story that even removed supernatural events stretches plausibility to the breaking point.
Very well show me the contemporary record.
Which makes it even worse. They were good at it and yet the records for Jesus aren’t there. The first Roman official that even mentions the Christians was after they had been around for decades and he doesn’t even seem to know what rank Pilot had.
Yeah yeah I suck. Get in line and take a number.
Oh shit 60 years of the events isn’t contemporary enough.
Hannibal didn’t exist either, I guess.
C’mon man, even Ehrman knows that’s stupid 🤣
See, you aren’t really interested in any intellectual argument. It’s a heart issue. You think you know better than God and want to be your own God. Hence the deconversion.
Take it up with Erhman. He is a big boy and can defend his views. Still waiting for the supposed evidence for your zombie in this “debate”.
Again with the mind reading.
Thallus (b. 52AD) might have wrote about a darkness and earthquake happening when Jesus was crucified.
Pliny the Younger (b. 61AD) testified to Jesus and talked how His followers thought He is God, and how they worshipped Him.
Phlegon (b. 80AD) likely confirmed the darkness and Jesus predicting the fall of the temple, also confirmed the crucifixion and resurrection
Celsus (b. 175AD) confirmed Jesus had powers and that He was believed to be born of a virgin
Flavius Josephus (b. 37ad) confirmed He existed also and was reportedly resurrected.
The Jewish Talmud confirmed Jesus existed and was crucified, although came 400 years after the fact.
Then there’s the entire Isaiah 53 prophecy we have from 700 years before Christ, the earliest copy being from 100 years before.
Then of course you have the New Testament on top of that.
This is more evidence than we have for other historical figures from around that time. Salvation is a free gift. It’s up to you whether or not you believe in it and accept the reality that God is real, that He really came down as man, died, then rose again.
Of course, people will sooner believe that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and that Christmas is originally pagan, both claims with no evidence, than this.
Wait… sorry… you’re actually claiming that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were actually written by those people as named in those gospels?