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Lift Chief said:
No no no.
We still need to talk about God being an Uber Pimp and my powers of precognition......
Either God does not exist or there is no free will.
- Thread starter Lift Chief
- Start date
No no no.
We still need to talk about God being an Uber Pimp and my powers of precognition......
Lift Chief
New member
distanced said:
Yeah i don't know all the specifics of the story.
Once i learned the general story i tuned out the details because i felt it was absurd.
I'm leaving now for real.
distanced
New member
Report on the Firmament
The Traditional Explanation
Until about the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) [See biography], Christian scholars understood the firmament of the Bible as depicting the rigid sky, which revolved around the earth once each day, carrying along all the stars. This assumed motion of the sky reflected the common-sense notion that the earth was stationary. For the stars to move in a manner consistent with observation, they had to be held fixed in their relative positions. The stars seemed to trace partial circles around the poles each night. Their movements appeared exactly as if they were fixed on the underside of a great revolving dome, or the inner surface of a sphere. This belief in a rigid sphere of heaven gave rise to the expression "the sphere of the fixed stars."
The planetary motions did not conform to this explanation, and it was the detailed study of the orbits of the planets by Johannes Kepler, his discovery of the elliptical form of the orbit of Mars, and Newton's interpretation of Kepler's discoveries, which led to the recognition of the law of gravity, and the abandonment of the idea of a rigid rotating firmament.
The apparent absurdity of the scriptural references to a rigid heavenly firmament and "waters above the heavens" has been exploited by humorists as an object of ridicule. Dietz and Holden include an account of the cosmology of scripture in their Creation/Evolution Satiricon. They claim the biblical earth is flat, and state: "The Genesis creation story tells that the earth is covered by a vault and that celestial bodies move inside this firmament. This makes sense only under the assumption that the earth is flat."
Along with their account, two cartoons depict the earth and the universe as they suppose the ancient authors of scripture believed it to be. A curious feature of these drawings is that the waters beneath the earth seem to conflict with the concept of fires of hell. These waters are shown in the cartoons being held up in a kind of sheet by two angels in one picture, and by two demons in the other, above the subterranean fires, over which Satan presides. The waters beneath the earth's crust seem to be about to put out the subterranean fires. The biblical universe, as they picture it, would have three water layers, one above the heavens, the next being the oceans and lakes of the world, and the third consisting of the waters beneath the earth. They wrote [p.65]:
While priests found it relatively easy to ignore the flat-earth implications in the Bible and to adopt the spherical system of Ptolemy, they were rudely shaken by Copernicus and Galileo. Galileo, of course, was arraigned before the Catholic Inquisition and forced to recant his heretical view that the earth rotated and also revolved around the sun. For scriptural reasons other early Protestant reformers also rejected the Copernican system. These included Luther, Calvin and Wesley. Some Protestant creationists are still fighting a rear-guard action against heliocentricity.
[For an example, see Introduction to the Firmament.]
[See also The Geocentricity Question.]
Dietz and Holden continue:
Biblically, the earth is arched over with a solid firmament (Genesis 1:7). Isaiah and the Psalms state the heavens are stretched out "like a curtain" and again "like a tent to dwell in." The universe, then, resembles a simple house with the earth as the ground floor and the firmament as the ceiling beneath which God suspends the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night. Waters or seas lie both above the firmament and beneath and surrounding the square or rectangular earth. Waters are let down upon the earth by the Lord and his angels through the "windows of heaven." Water also ascends to the earth through the "fountains of the deep." St. Augustine said it mattered little whether the celestial dome rested on pillars or hung over the edges of the earth.
Dietz and Holden describe the ideas of the 6th century AD Egyptian monk, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who believed in a flat earth. They quote his statement: "We say therefore with Isaiah that the heaven embracing the earth is a vault, with Job that it is joined to the earth, and with Moses that its length is greater than its breadth." They quote Genesis 1:6-10 from the New American Bible, which has: "Then God said, 'Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate one body of water from another.' And so it happened... God called the dome 'the sky.'..." The authors continue:
Envisioned in this pre-scientific account is a flat terrestrial plain over which is erected the great crystalline firmament or the dome of the sky. Water not only partially covered the earth but also formed a vast reservoir above the dome. And why not? This model accounted nicely for rainfall and explained why the sky is blue-the colour of pure water.
In the ancient biblical view the universe was three storied. It consisted of the cavernous underground of Hades or Hell, the flat earth proper, and the sky-dome beneath which were attached the sun, moon and stars. It was quite natural to believe that stars fell from time to time and that there was a real danger of the sky itself falling. These themes occur throughout the Bible. (There follows a list of scriptures.)
A similar approach to the firmament of scripture was adopted by Paul H. Seely. While affirming scripture was divinely inspired, Seely pointed to statements of Jesus and the prophets of the Old Testament which seem to indicate the stars were small and could fall from the firmament to the earth, and suggested that Jesus' statement in Matthew 5:45 that God "makes his sun to rise" shows Jesus believed in a geocentric universe. According to Seely, "the Bible portrays a three-storied universe, a cosmology which any modern man will reject as being scientifically erroneous." He wrote [Seely 1969, p. 18]:
The three-storied universe is a cosmology wherein the universe is conceived of as consisting of three stories. The ceiling of Sheol, the bottom story, is the surface of the earth. The surface of the earth, in turn, is the floor of the middle story. The ceiling of the middle story is the firmament with its contiguous heavenly ocean. This firmament with its ocean is, in turn, the floor of the top story, heaven.
Dietz and Holden pictured Biblical cosmology in this fashion for a joke, but Seely was not joking. A rebuttal to Seely's argument was made by Stanley Udd, who defended a canopy theory in which liquid water is supposed to have formerly existed above the earth's atmosphere. He described the interpretation of the biblical firmament by Seely and other scholars:
Such critics contend that the Genesis narrative reflects an early Hebrew understanding of cosmology in which the sky was over-arched by a ponderous, hemispheric bell called the "firmament." This supposed vault supported the "waters above the firmament" and was equipped with trap-doors through which rain might descend. From this imagined structure were then hung the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day of creation.
The firmament was commonly depicted in medieval religious art as an arc or dome above which God and the angels resided. It was also represented by domes on churches and mosques. The origins of this concept, however, belong not in the scripture, but in the philosophy and epic poetry of the Greeks, as this report explains.
References
Dietz, Robert S., and John C. Holden. 1987. Creation/Evolution Satiricon. The Bookmaker, Winthrop WA.
Seely, Paul H. 1969. The three-storied universe, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, 21(1):18- 22. (See p. 18.)
See also these papers by Paul Seely: The Firmament and the Water Above Part I: The Meaning of raqiaà in Gen 1:6-8, from the Westminster Theological Journal 53 (Fall 1991) 241-261, and The Firmament and the Water Above Part II: The Meaning of "The Water above the Firmament" in Gen 1:6-8, Westminster Theological Journal 94 (1992) 47-63.
Seely, Paul H. 1989. Inerrant wisdom: science and inerrancy in biblical perspective. Evangelical Reform Inc. Portland Oregon.
Udd, Stanley V. 1975. The Canopy and Genesis 1:6-8. Creation Research Society Quarterly 12(2):90-93.
© Copyright 1996 by Douglas E. Cox
All Rights Reserved.
The Traditional Explanation
Until about the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) [See biography], Christian scholars understood the firmament of the Bible as depicting the rigid sky, which revolved around the earth once each day, carrying along all the stars. This assumed motion of the sky reflected the common-sense notion that the earth was stationary. For the stars to move in a manner consistent with observation, they had to be held fixed in their relative positions. The stars seemed to trace partial circles around the poles each night. Their movements appeared exactly as if they were fixed on the underside of a great revolving dome, or the inner surface of a sphere. This belief in a rigid sphere of heaven gave rise to the expression "the sphere of the fixed stars."
The planetary motions did not conform to this explanation, and it was the detailed study of the orbits of the planets by Johannes Kepler, his discovery of the elliptical form of the orbit of Mars, and Newton's interpretation of Kepler's discoveries, which led to the recognition of the law of gravity, and the abandonment of the idea of a rigid rotating firmament.
The apparent absurdity of the scriptural references to a rigid heavenly firmament and "waters above the heavens" has been exploited by humorists as an object of ridicule. Dietz and Holden include an account of the cosmology of scripture in their Creation/Evolution Satiricon. They claim the biblical earth is flat, and state: "The Genesis creation story tells that the earth is covered by a vault and that celestial bodies move inside this firmament. This makes sense only under the assumption that the earth is flat."
Along with their account, two cartoons depict the earth and the universe as they suppose the ancient authors of scripture believed it to be. A curious feature of these drawings is that the waters beneath the earth seem to conflict with the concept of fires of hell. These waters are shown in the cartoons being held up in a kind of sheet by two angels in one picture, and by two demons in the other, above the subterranean fires, over which Satan presides. The waters beneath the earth's crust seem to be about to put out the subterranean fires. The biblical universe, as they picture it, would have three water layers, one above the heavens, the next being the oceans and lakes of the world, and the third consisting of the waters beneath the earth. They wrote [p.65]:
While priests found it relatively easy to ignore the flat-earth implications in the Bible and to adopt the spherical system of Ptolemy, they were rudely shaken by Copernicus and Galileo. Galileo, of course, was arraigned before the Catholic Inquisition and forced to recant his heretical view that the earth rotated and also revolved around the sun. For scriptural reasons other early Protestant reformers also rejected the Copernican system. These included Luther, Calvin and Wesley. Some Protestant creationists are still fighting a rear-guard action against heliocentricity.
[For an example, see Introduction to the Firmament.]
[See also The Geocentricity Question.]
Dietz and Holden continue:
Biblically, the earth is arched over with a solid firmament (Genesis 1:7). Isaiah and the Psalms state the heavens are stretched out "like a curtain" and again "like a tent to dwell in." The universe, then, resembles a simple house with the earth as the ground floor and the firmament as the ceiling beneath which God suspends the sun to rule the day and the moon and stars to rule the night. Waters or seas lie both above the firmament and beneath and surrounding the square or rectangular earth. Waters are let down upon the earth by the Lord and his angels through the "windows of heaven." Water also ascends to the earth through the "fountains of the deep." St. Augustine said it mattered little whether the celestial dome rested on pillars or hung over the edges of the earth.
Dietz and Holden describe the ideas of the 6th century AD Egyptian monk, Cosmas Indicopleustes, who believed in a flat earth. They quote his statement: "We say therefore with Isaiah that the heaven embracing the earth is a vault, with Job that it is joined to the earth, and with Moses that its length is greater than its breadth." They quote Genesis 1:6-10 from the New American Bible, which has: "Then God said, 'Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate one body of water from another.' And so it happened... God called the dome 'the sky.'..." The authors continue:
Envisioned in this pre-scientific account is a flat terrestrial plain over which is erected the great crystalline firmament or the dome of the sky. Water not only partially covered the earth but also formed a vast reservoir above the dome. And why not? This model accounted nicely for rainfall and explained why the sky is blue-the colour of pure water.
In the ancient biblical view the universe was three storied. It consisted of the cavernous underground of Hades or Hell, the flat earth proper, and the sky-dome beneath which were attached the sun, moon and stars. It was quite natural to believe that stars fell from time to time and that there was a real danger of the sky itself falling. These themes occur throughout the Bible. (There follows a list of scriptures.)
A similar approach to the firmament of scripture was adopted by Paul H. Seely. While affirming scripture was divinely inspired, Seely pointed to statements of Jesus and the prophets of the Old Testament which seem to indicate the stars were small and could fall from the firmament to the earth, and suggested that Jesus' statement in Matthew 5:45 that God "makes his sun to rise" shows Jesus believed in a geocentric universe. According to Seely, "the Bible portrays a three-storied universe, a cosmology which any modern man will reject as being scientifically erroneous." He wrote [Seely 1969, p. 18]:
The three-storied universe is a cosmology wherein the universe is conceived of as consisting of three stories. The ceiling of Sheol, the bottom story, is the surface of the earth. The surface of the earth, in turn, is the floor of the middle story. The ceiling of the middle story is the firmament with its contiguous heavenly ocean. This firmament with its ocean is, in turn, the floor of the top story, heaven.
Dietz and Holden pictured Biblical cosmology in this fashion for a joke, but Seely was not joking. A rebuttal to Seely's argument was made by Stanley Udd, who defended a canopy theory in which liquid water is supposed to have formerly existed above the earth's atmosphere. He described the interpretation of the biblical firmament by Seely and other scholars:
Such critics contend that the Genesis narrative reflects an early Hebrew understanding of cosmology in which the sky was over-arched by a ponderous, hemispheric bell called the "firmament." This supposed vault supported the "waters above the firmament" and was equipped with trap-doors through which rain might descend. From this imagined structure were then hung the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day of creation.
The firmament was commonly depicted in medieval religious art as an arc or dome above which God and the angels resided. It was also represented by domes on churches and mosques. The origins of this concept, however, belong not in the scripture, but in the philosophy and epic poetry of the Greeks, as this report explains.
References
Dietz, Robert S., and John C. Holden. 1987. Creation/Evolution Satiricon. The Bookmaker, Winthrop WA.
Seely, Paul H. 1969. The three-storied universe, Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, 21(1):18- 22. (See p. 18.)
See also these papers by Paul Seely: The Firmament and the Water Above Part I: The Meaning of raqiaà in Gen 1:6-8, from the Westminster Theological Journal 53 (Fall 1991) 241-261, and The Firmament and the Water Above Part II: The Meaning of "The Water above the Firmament" in Gen 1:6-8, Westminster Theological Journal 94 (1992) 47-63.
Seely, Paul H. 1989. Inerrant wisdom: science and inerrancy in biblical perspective. Evangelical Reform Inc. Portland Oregon.
Udd, Stanley V. 1975. The Canopy and Genesis 1:6-8. Creation Research Society Quarterly 12(2):90-93.
© Copyright 1996 by Douglas E. Cox
All Rights Reserved.
C
Code
Guest
Just 5 more pages, please Daddy Lift Chief!!!!
Lift Chief
New member
Code said:
lol- i'll compensate for this by having no serious posts for the next few days.
Lift Chief
New member
Shit cant stay away.
Interesting theme...
In the time of galileo christians did not accept the then theory that the earth rotated and orbited around the sun.
In the time of evolution christians do not accept the theory that humans evolved from apes.
Seems that christians who interpret the bible literally are constantly being usurped by science... they just lag behind the open minded of us by a few decades.
I'm really, really leaving now.
Interesting theme...
In the time of galileo christians did not accept the then theory that the earth rotated and orbited around the sun.
In the time of evolution christians do not accept the theory that humans evolved from apes.
Seems that christians who interpret the bible literally are constantly being usurped by science... they just lag behind the open minded of us by a few decades.
I'm really, really leaving now.
FreakMonster
New member
Lift Chief said:
Well faith is it's own evidence but since you don't have faith I we can't use that. LOL I wouldn't call my faith blind since I already talked about evidence in the manuscripts, in prophecy, and 2 others I didn't touch upon, statistics and archeology. I can't prove everything to you about the bible on a silver platter, the bible proves itself, in all the fullfilled prophecies written in it. Isn't that enough? Although I can base everything I believe on faith, I also use common sense. There had to be a creator, God.
Do you believe in a God?
I recommend reading "the case for christ" by lee strobel.
This is an amazing book. When he wrote this book he was actually an athiest and went out to try and prove the bible wrong, presenting the top arguments against the bible to leading biblical authorities. He ended up convincing himself that it is true, and now he is a Christian. It is fascinating book, easy to read yet extremely informative and engaging.
Because Christianity is unique among the world’s religions for several important reasons -- not the least of which being that Christianity, unlike other religions, is historic and evidential. Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure. He was, of course, born in Bethlehem in Judea during the reign of Caesar Augustus and was put to death by Pontius Pilate, a first century Roman Governor. More important, the testimony of His life, death, and resurrection comes to us by way of eyewitness accounts (1 John 1:1-4). Therefore, Christianity is a historic faith and its claims can be validated by examining the testimony of history.
None of the other religions of the world can claim this kind of historical support.
Another unique feature of Christianity is that its founder claimed to be God (John 8:58). Of the great religious leaders of the world (Buddha, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao Tzu, Mohammed), only Jesus claimed to be God in human flesh (Mark 14:62). Yet far from being an empty claim, His historically verifiable resurrection from the dead vindicated His claim to deity (Rom 1:4; 1 Cor. 15:3-8). Other religions, like Buddhism and Islam, claim miracles in support of their faith, but unlike Christianity, these miracles lack historical verification.
Finally, an additional feature setting Christianity apart from other religions is that it is a coherent belief system. Some Christian doctrines might transcend complete comprehension, but unlike the claims of many religions, they are not irrational or absurd. Furthermore, the Christian faith is unique in that it can account for the vast array of phenomena that we encounter in everyday life: the laws of science, the universal laws of logic, ethical norms, love, the meaning in life, and the problem of evil and human
suffering. So to state it philosophically: The Christian faith corresponds with the present state of affairs.
Didn't you know that Gods time is not the same as our time. The 24 hour day was a man made idea.
Last edited:
FreakMonster
New member
Lift Chief said:
Positive relatioships between science and christianity
http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html
http://www.grisda.org/bclausen/papers/aid.htm
FreakMonster said:
The above paragraph demonstrates why I can respect the Bible as a historical text, and yet can't accept it as the Word of God and believe everything in it.
Jesus of Nazareth is a mistranslation that is made popular today by modern Christianity. The original text was written as Jesus the Nazarene. The Nazarenes were a large Jewish sect of which Jesus belonged. The Jewish religion at the time of Jesus was divided into many different sects. Fact is, the city of Nazareth wasn't even founded until sometime around 60 AD, almost 30 years after the crucifiction!
Admittedly it's a small point, but unfortunately the modern Bible (and modern Christianity) is full of mistranslations like these. Most are probably due to different slang and meanings between the many languages and time periods the Bible has been translated to, but the fact is that much of the meaning of modern Christianity is based on incorrect information.
One of the more popular "concepts" in modern Christianity is that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary. This is in fact false, it is another mistranslation. The word virgin in the English Bible was translated from the word virgo in the Latin version, meaning "young woman", which was translated from the original Hebrew word "almah" if I remember correctly, also meaning young woman. In other words, Jesus was born just like you and me, from a man and a woman having intercourse, there was nothing "supernatural" about it. Tell that to most Christians and they will yell blasphemy.
I am 31 years old and I was born a Christian. I went to church for 18 years of my life, I have read the entire Bible twice in my lifetime. As I got older, church (and the Bible to a lesser degree) seemed more and more like crowd control than religion to me. I questioned my faith, so I set off to learn everything I could about the Bible and religion. I did this over the course of many years beginning in college, and the more I learned about the origins of the Bible and other religions, the more I realized that (I believe) modern religion is more MAN made than the work of God.
Did Jesus actually exist? I believe he did. Obviously some man named Jesus had a profound effect on the world and society around him. Was he the Son of God, or was he just an exceptional man and leader? I don't know, what I do know is that a book consisting of hundreds of stories written by dozens of authors from many parts of the world over the course of centuries simply cannot be taken as totally factual, especially considering how many different versions of it exist, and the differences between them. The FACT is this: MAN wrote the Bible, not God.
Does God exist? I believe he does. There is an intelligent design in the universe, like it has been created with an intent or goal in mind. Is he the Biblical God who created the universe and contols our destinies? I don't know, but seeing how the Bible is man made, and nothing man made is perfect, I just can't take it as absolute. There is simply too much room for human error. Certainly the Bible is based on history and truth, but then so is the movie "Midway". Did the events of the Battle of Midway unfold EXACTLY as laid out in the movie, or was there some exagerration?
Imnotdutch
butler monkey
Interesting post.........wonder if anybody will want to argue the point with you.
Mengy said:
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