Response to RWC's Atheist Questions

by Liberty 38 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  JosephAlward

  RWC wrote,

  I contend that God has made his presence known through out the ages and the message of salvation is known. You clearly know it, but have chosen not to beleive it.

  How do you explain why an awareness of your god, and his message of salvation, has not been made known to billions of humans from other faiths? God could have made them all aware, couldn't he, since he is all-powerful and all-knowing, according to your faith?

  The god you believe in, RWC, embedded into the DNA of all humans the means by which the human can become aware of its own existence, and instinctively seek nourishment and sex. Why, then, if your God exists, and really does want man to be aware of God's existence, and instinctively to know his message of salvation, didn't he just embed that instinctive awareness and message into our DNA? He has the power to do that, doesn't he?

  I've asked this question a few dozen times, and never has a God-believer ever responded to it.

  Joseph F. Alward
  "Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"

  http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html
• 

  Liberty

  Hi RWC,

  I wanted to get to a few more of your points as time permits. As to Biblical chronology, please note that I started with Adam and Eve since I knew that Bible literalists have backpeddled away from the concept of 24 hour creation days replacing them with more science friendly "undefined lengths". I only addressed the Bible's chronology from the creation of man which is clearly mapped out and given specific time frames as Bishop Usher dicovered centuries ago. By following the geneology of Adam's family tree the Bible gives us its own limited time frame which is oppossed to reality. This is not due to any lack of understanding on my part but is clearly the Bible versus reality. All the evidence says that a number of human beings had existed for far longer than the Bible's own historic record can possibly accomodate even if Adam lived without a mate for ten thousand years.

  I also ignored the fact that the Creation sequence mapped out in the Bible is nonsense even if I grant that the word "day" doesn't really mean a day and could be millions of years long. How could light exist before the Sun? Or how could the Earth, which relys on the Sun for its orbit gravitation, have been created before the Sun? Read the account for yourself and you will see that it makes no sense even if it took millions of years. Read for yourself the Tower of Babel story and you will see that God was afraid of man's abilities embodied in the mud brick tower that they were building and He confused their language to slow down their intellectual advancement. You made up your explaination, for such is noted nowhere in the account. You need to reread your Bible as it is clearly spelled out. Your explainations are extra -Biblical and designed to make nonsense sound reasonable. I understand why and don't fault you for it. You believe strongly and will try anything to make sense of it. There is a limit however to this kind of apologetic thinking, especially when faced with the harsh reality of evidence.
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  Liberty

  Yet more points RWC,

  The Bible makes for itself the claim that, "all scriptures are inspired by God" so how can I be faulted for rejecting the Bible as a whole when such large sections of it have been proven false by the evidence I can clearly see all around me. The fact that I cannot believe in the Bible as God's true word is totally consistant considering simple logic and an understanding of the observable Universe. Why would God create a Universe full of evidence for us to find which contradicts His inspired word? It also seems strange that the more we discover the less true the Bible seems instead of the other way around. Bible apologists are always modifying their theories to conform to science rather than science having to conform to the Bible's views. Why is this the case if the Bible is true? So far you have presented no evidence for me to even believe the Bible, let alone to believe in your God. If we can only know God through the Bible and the Bible is proven false then I am left without a guide since God chooses to remain unseen and silent.

  You mentioned in an earlier post that you believed the Bible was true, as opposed to other ancient writings, because only the Bible could predict future events accurately. I have heard this presented before as evidence but applying logic to these predictions soon renders them meaningless. Since the Bible was describing events that happened in the distant past how can we be sure that these predictions were not recorded after the fact? For example, WWII is long since past for us and we know what happened but if I now wrote a book which described in detail all of these events but said it was written in 1920. A person finding such an old text a thousand years from now would be astounded by my powers of precognition as I accurately "predicted" all of the events of WWII. How would they know after a thousand years the difference between a book written in 1920 or one written in 2002 because there is only a 72 year difference between the two? What if I wrote my book in 1946 instead of 2002 and claimed a writing date of 1936, such a ten year difference would be imperceptable after a thousand years. How much more so would this be true after more than two thousand years? The Bible's dates at writing are even more difficult to substatiate because we are not sure who wrote these works or when exactly they were actually translated from an oral prophecy into a written one because we have so little extra-biblical evidence and no original manuscripts. How do you know the Bible predicted these now long past dates and events?

  If Jesus was real those who wrote about him 70 years after his birth already knew the old Bible passages needed to make him appear as if he fulfilled them and "prove" he was the Messiah, so surprise surprise the events in his life were "predicted" by Scripture. There is no evidence of any Gospel writings until around 70 AD so Jesus was dead for 40 years before the events of his life were even commited to paper. The human mind is not capable of retaining accurate information about the past without the help of external documentation. Do you even kow the name of your grandfather's grandfather? I don't without doing a geneology search. I know nothing of this close relative who lived just 100 years ago or so. As a further illustration of this fact I went to a cave in Missouri and the historian explained that all that is known about the white man who first explored the cave was his last name. The origin of some ladders and timbers found in the cave were completly unknown even though they must have been used there just 140 years ago or so since they were of a European style. All of these events are forgotten,details lost, and people's lives forgotten in just a few hundred years in a modern industrial era with a wealth of printed history. How much more true is this when dealing in thousands of years in an age where writing was rare and all copying done by hand? I can't even tell you about my great great grandfather so how could we trust someone to accurately relate the events of the past from the Bible days without it becoming mixed with myth and gossip, especially if it remained a soley oral tradition until being written down long after the events took place. There were no reporters or cameras to record these events, no newspapers to file away and research, no scientific journals....just the word of a wandering tribesman.
• 

  JT

  The comment was made:

  "writing are even more difficult to substatiate because we are not sure who wrote these works"

  ######

  and this is really the bottom line- I posed this issue to a believer in the office once by asking him to show from THE BIBLE

  chapter and vs were Moses stopped writing and joshua picked up

  and of course you can't tell,

  the problem that presents is

  WHAT OTHER PARTS have Shadow writers?????????????

  JUST A THOUGHT

  JAMES

  wa
• 

  Liberty

  I also wanted to point out that all of the predictions made about the future (those beyond what happened in the Biblical scope) have proven to be false. Its been two thousand years and Jesus has still not returned as he promised. The World has not ended. There have been no battles between the armies of God and the Devil. There is no thousand year reign of Christ and the dead have not come back to life.

  To impress us a prediction must be about future events spelled out in detail that then really happens just as stated AFTER the prediction was made so that everyone can clearly see it was a true prediction. The Bible fails this test completely. The only "fulfilled" events are undocumentable and all in the distant past, while all predictions for the future remain unfulfilled just as one would expect from mere human beings. In short, the Bible tells us nothing about our future. It did not predict space flight, visits to the Moon, cloning, TV, radio, atom bombs, etc. and into infinity. If God could not foresee these major events I have little belief He could tell us anything about the future.
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  JosephAlward

  A link to comments by Liberty about prophecy in this thread has been put in the "Historicity of Jesus" section of my web page. Its title is "Debunking Prophecy."

  Joseph F. Alward
  "Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"

  http://members.aol.com/jalw/joseph_alward.html
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  peacefulpete

  Memories, 21 years ago posting using a WEBTV. Great discussions.
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  Magnum

  Just skimmed. Very interesting. Saving to read in detail later.
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  Phizzy

  Thanks for Posting this Thread ! Some wonderful comments from " Liberty" , and all this stuff is still SO relevant, we still get exactly the same shite from believers, almost word for word.