The Bible, Why not Reliable?
by sayitsnotso 93 Replies latest watchtower bible
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SAHARA
Seems to me that "unbelievers" are saying the same thing that atheists have been saying forever; "Show me the evidence that God exists"!!! Nothing new... Giving undeniable absolute proof that God exists is what the atheist wants wether it's the Christian God, Muslim God or whatever. It just isn't possible to satisfy that demand, so as long as that's the case, there is nothing more to say.
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PrimateDave
Making excuses for the ignorance of the Bible writers?
Why not just accept the fact that you believe in the Bible simply because you were told it was true by ignorant people who were following centuries old traditions? Being ignorant is not a crime. But businesses like the WTS take advantage of such ignorance to steal lives and fortunes.
The Bible writers knew nothing about Galilean astronomy, the nature of light, the process of fusion, stelar evolution, the periodic table, DNA... Do I need to go on? If you had been raised with emphasis on the sciences instead of Fundamentalist religious superstition, and had then read the Bible, you would not try fitting a square peg into a round hole by trying to fit Scriptures to reality in the 21st Century.
I agree with Donny except that I began to doubt the Bible even before I put the WTS under scrutiny.
Oh, and about the "morality" of the Bible, it always amazed me that a man who committed incest with his daughters could still be referred to as "righteous," and yet god killed Lot's wife for turning around. Some morality that.
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PSacramento
SISS,
Quoting from the NWT will just confuse you more.
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undercover
Couldn't something have been blocking the light during these creative events?
WT-think...
There's nothing in the account to indicate blockage off light or diffusing it (as the WT calls it).
The account contradicts itself. Light is created on day one after the earth complete with day and night, but then the sun and moon are created on day four. Nothing said about light clearing up by day four to allow the sun and moon to be seen. And if that was the case, how does that affect plant life that was created on day three?
Take the WT blinders off. Analyze the situation. Use logic.
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Leolaia
40 men wrote it over a span of 1600 years or so. But all 66 books are harmonious and contain a consistent theme. How could this be possible by humans alone?
This statement embodies claims that need to be established before they are to be "refuted". 1) The "span of 1600 years" presumes Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, a claim that rests on tradition (found in the NT) and not on empirical observation. The simple fact, well-attested in extant written sources, is that the Hebrew language did not yet exist so early as 1500 BC; the language in the Pentateuch is from a much later age, and even contains material of varying dates. 2) There is no a priori reason, other than later Christian tradition, to regard "all 66 books" as a self-contained closed corpus, rather than the open-ended library that may lack certain books or contain others; this 66-book canon is just one of many canons recognized by Christians, many of which recognize intermediate semi-canonical bodies of scripture. 3) "Harmonious" only through harmonizing interpretation; the gospel nativity and resurrection narratives presume quite different scenarios respectively. 4) The presence of a "consistent theme" is in the eye of the beholder and a product of post facto interpretation of the entire corpus, although it must not be forgotten that the later parts of the "Bible" were literarily dependent on the older parts, and thus developed and invented themes out of older scriptural material. It is not the case of 40 men working independently coming up with the same theme. One could easily find overarching themes (whether actually present in the text or a product of harmonizing interpretation) in any vast body of religious literature, such as the Zoroastrian scriptures.
It accurately fortold events. (i.e. naming who and how Babylon woud fall).
If this is a reference to the naming of Cyrus in Deutero-Isaiah, then this is not convincing evidence, particularly since the writer presupposes (not prophesies) the destruction of Jerusalem as a past event, it is the release from Babylonian captivity of the people he is writing to (the "comfort") that lies in the future; his standpoint is that of the time of Cyrus himself. In Isaiah's time in the 8th century BC Babylon already lay in ruins and Isaiah refers to the fall of Babylon by the Assyrians as a past event (ch. 23). Chapters 40-66 are from a later hand or hands; the style is unmistakably different and nowhere does the writer(s) of ch. 40-66 claim to be Isaiah (whereas Isaiah frequently referred to himself as the author in ch. 1-40). It was very common in antiquity for books to acquire accretions and Deutero-Isaiah is more-or-less a separate composition copied onto the same scroll. More to the point, these passages in Deutero-Isaiah show a close kinship with the wording in the Cyrus Proclamation and thus were likely written around the time when the Proclamation was promulgated. Deutero-Isaiah also likely shows familiarity with Zoroastrian concepts, which again points to an exilic date.
More broadly, one should mention how events are NOT accurately foretold elsewhere in the Bible. Ezekiel for instance predicted that Nebuchadnezzar would utterly destroy Tyre, leaving the island completely bare never to be rebuilt (ch. 26-28). However Nebuchadnezzar's siege against Tyre turned out to be a very long drawn-out and costly affair and although the city finally capitulated, it was not destroyed and Nebuchadnezzar simply placed his own governor on the throne. Ezekiel candidly admitted that his Tyre prediction did not come to pass (ch. 29), and so he shifts the expectation to Egypt instead, making a new prediction that Nebuchadnezzar would utterly destroy Egypt and depopulate its people from the land (ch. 29-32). But this did not happen either. The reign of Amasis was one of the most prosperous in Egypt's history and there is utterly no historical or archaeological evidence of interruption; the Apis bulls alone show that there couldn't have been an interruption. And Tyre was rebuilt many times over the millennia and is still inhabited today.
Also it is plain from the Bible and from the whole history of Jewish and Christian interpretation of scripture that any prophecy that did not come to pass as foretold can simply be reinterpreted to refer to something still in the future. The "great vision" of Daniel (ch. 10-12) is an excellent example of this, which was quite specific in its prediction about the demise of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the resurrection that was to follow. The vision henceforth was then applied to later interpreters to a still-future eschatological War (as is evident in the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Roman siege of Jerusalem (as is evident in the synoptic gospels), and later Christian ideas of the antichrist. Even today, Adventists and JWs are looking for present-day events to "fulfill" this still outstanding prophecy.
So if a prophecy makes a "hit", it is credited by interpreters as a hit, but if it is a "miss" the inaccuracy is simply interpreted away and the oracle is either made retroactively into a "hit" or is made into a still-outstanding prophecy that will someday be fulfulled in the future. Also prophetic oracles were sometimes redacted later on to make the "hit" even more precise; this is apparent in Jeremiah where we have two different editions of the book preserved in the MT and the LXX, the redacted text makes rather vague but mostly accurate predictions much more specific.
What made a prophecy acceptable in ancient times was not so much whether it came true or not (despite the claims of the Deuteronomist), but whether the prophet had the right ideological and moral message as esteemed by the community in which the book is deemed to be scriptural.
The notion that if everyone followed the morals of the bible the world would be a better place.
Which morals? There is much in the OT that reflects the ANE culture that is quite alien to us today and is quite similar to aspects of Arab culture that many in the West find unacceptable. If you mean the ethical portions of the NT, this is probably true to some extent, as I like the philosophy contained therein quite a bit, but one must recognize that there is not much that is original there. Much of the ethical teaching reflects what other rabbis taught and can be found in the Talmud, and Buddhism and other faiths have developed highly refined moral views as well. Even within the Hellenistic milieu of the NT, Stoicism offered a very principled code of ethics centered on self-control and mutual respect that is quite compatible with the views found in the NT (indeed some parts of the NT appear to reflect Stoic influence, such as 2 Peter).
Scientific accuracy in a time when people did not know about these things (progressive order of earth's preparation for human habitation, saying the earth was round and hung on nothing, water moves in a cycle, universe is governed by laws, what it touches on regarding heath and sanitation is accurate (quarantine, waste disposal, not having a calm mentality bad for the health)
The claimed "scientific accuracy" is not anything unexpected for the ANE, much of the claims dissolve under scrutiny. 1) The "progressive order of earth's preparation" in the Priestly creation narrative in Genesis 1 does not follow the known geological cycle or a modern scientific understanding of the world. The creation of the firmament in the second day and the creation of the sun, moon, and stars inside this firmament on the fourth day (after the formation of seas and vegetation in the third day) especially betray the kind of geocentric cosmology found in the ANE and elsewhere in the OT (and in other Jewish books). The order also follows roughly that in Psalm 104, which itself is probably dependent on the Egyptian Hymn to the Aten poem, and the order is altogether different in the seperate creation account (Yahwist) given in ch. 2 of Genesis. The Priestly creation narrative is closely related to other ANE creation myths, especially the Phoenician version cited by Philo of Byblos, and Hesoid's theogonic account also has a similar order (e.g. chaos existing first, then the earth, places of darkness, and night emerging, then the outer sky and day, then the sky, mountains, and sea, etc.). The order in the Priestly account is also largely implicational, e.g. light must precede vegetation, land must precede vegetation and animals, the firmament must be made before the luminaries that are placed in it, vegetation must precede animals, etc. 2) The Bible does not say the earth is round, and indeed the cosmology is very much similar to that found in the ANE, with a flat-earth and a domed sky (firmament). Indeed, the passage in Job saying that the earth is "hung on nothing" is chock full of concepts found in Canaanite mythology (e.g. the Rephaim of the underworld, heavenly Zaphon, the pillars of the heavens, the stretching out of the heavens, the Sea as the dragon the deity engages in battle with, etc.), and the context shows that the writer had Sheol in mind, not some anachronistically modern notion of "outer space". 3) What most people don't realize about Job 36:27-28 is that the Hebrew is very difficult, contains a likely Akkadian loanword which rarely occurs in Hebrew and which is notoriously difficult to understand, and is open to many different renderings which do not necessarily embody any concept of "evaporation" (the LXX for instance has no hint of a water cycle in its rendering). Whereas the NWT says "he draws up the drops of water", the KJV has "he maketh small the drops of water," a rather different concept. In fact, the Hebrew ygr` simply means "he draws" or "he takes away" without necessarily an upward directionality (cf. the use of the word in Numbers 36:3-4, Job 36:7); Delitzsch renders the sentence "he draweth down the drops of water". The latter is compatible with the cosmology found in ch. 1 and 7-8 of Genesis, and elsewhere, which conceives of an immense body of water above the firmament which constitutes a solid barrier supporting the heavenly waters but which lets them out occasionally through the windows of heaven (an identical concept is found in Ugaritic texts), through which waters pour out to fill the clouds and then rain down. These concepts are found in Job as well, cf. the firmament as a solid structure (Job 22:14, 37:18), the idea of celestial channels for the rain (38:35), heavenly storehouses of hail and snow (v. 22), and heaven as where the Deep is frozen and hidden (v. 29-30; cf. 37:10). It seems much more consistent to read the passage as referring to God drawing water from the heavenly reservoir, distilling the water into individual drops, and then binding them up in the clouds (cf. 37:11). 4) All ancients realized that the "universe moved according to laws," as old as Stonehenge we know that they measured the cycles of the seasons, and the Hebrews certainly were in touch with this knowledge. 5) That an organized society could devise a system of sanitation and hygiene is not evidence of supernatural knowledge; it involves figuring out what works and what doesn't, and what maybe neighboring peoples are doing. But in fact sanitation in Israel was behind that in more advanced societies in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Most of the commands in the Torah on hygiene have to do with ritual cleanness rather than physical cleanliness. The kind of sanitation law found in Deuteronomy 23:13-14 thus only pertains to (holy war) military conditions where ritual cleanliness was important and did not apply to the general population; we know from such passages as 2 Samuel 22:43, Micah 7:10, Nehemiah 3:13-14, and from archaeological excavations that hygiene was not very advanced and that people deposited their waste in the streets and that men commonly relieved themselves by urinating on the walls of buildings (1 Samuel 25:22, 34, 1 Kings 14:10). Moreover, because the consumption and sacrifice of pork was taboo, the Israelites likely depended less on pigs as portable sanitation units like the Egyptians and other ANE societies did.
Honesty of it's writters
Another claim that is presumed to be true rather than demonstrated. How can dishonesty be demonstrated in ancient texts? Even those passing off pious fictions may not think of themselves as having a dishonest intent. And how do you show that the level of honesty is somehow different than with any other ancient corpus of scripture? How honest were the Qumran sectarians in their own production of scripture, none of which is in the Bible. Were they as honest, less honest, or what? This is completely subjective.
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Mad Sweeney
Original autograph texts upon which the Bible we have today is based do not exist. There is absolutely NO WAY to know whether our oldest manuscripts are accurate copies of original documents, when any original documents were written, or who actually wrote them.
I take it you apply this to ALL forms of Historical writing?
Yes. I would ask whether ANY form of historical writing is an original autograph text, or a copy of copies. If the oldest writing available is a copy of copies, then there is no way to know for certain the accuracy of that copy as it relates to both its details and its relationship to some alleged original.
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Mad Sweeney
As for the Genesis creation account, it's about as believable as Tolkien's creation myth in "The Silmarillion" but not nearly as interesting or enjoyable to read.
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Mad Sweeney
Seems to me that "unbelievers" are saying the same thing that atheists have been saying forever; "Show me the evidence that God exists"!!! Nothing new... Giving undeniable absolute proof that God exists is what the atheist wants wether it's the Christian God, Muslim God or whatever. It just isn't possible to satisfy that demand, so as long as that's the case, there is nothing more to say.
SAHARA, we're talking about a book in this thread, not about the existence of God. A book is a tangible physical thing that there is no reason to ever accept as true without evidence. Believing something is true based on tradition, revelation, authority, or some combination of the three is believing based on NOTHING and believers SHOULD ADMIT such. But most don't. Most who believe the Bible is God's infallible Word try to claim there IS EVIDENCE of that when there is NONE.
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poppers
A friend of mine recently told me that her son's private, Christian school taught his class that there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark. (Allow that to sink in.)
Wow, I wonder who got the job of cleaning out the dung each day? And I wonder what they fed them, especially the carnivorous ones?
