in response to the person who said this:
> Fact; the Bible is an accurate, albeit biased, historical account and
> none of the events described in the Bible have been disproven - not even
> the whole Sodom shabang.
i have to disagree, all of the history in the old testament (i'm not even
going to start on the new one) is fiction written around actual events. they
can date a lot of the events that did happen to within like three hundred
years of similar events in the era but the entire book is filled with
impossible going ons. the bible is one huge typo. it's collected from over a
thousand years of oral history and vague scriptings that some jewish priests
coddled together into one book about a hundred or so years bce which they
edited heavily to support their own current political beliefs at the time.
almost everything has been changed and misread since the king james version.
ie; the red sea was actually the sea of reeds, a swamp area in egypt. that
ones moot because nowhere in egyptian archaeology is there any mention of the
israelites. several huge sections of the bibles history are taken wholesale
from other, more ancient civilaztions and then had their respective names
changed to fit the times. almost everything people believe about the bible is
a misunderstanding of what it actually says. example: nowhere in the original
scriptures does it say that God is the only deity. it says only that he is
jealous and while you can worship other gods if you like you must worship him
first. almost all of the commandments (there were actually something like 50,
not ten) were directed to keep the israelites from joining a neighboring
tribe called the caananites who had a much more liberal view of lifestyle (to
worship their god baal you had to have insane amounts of sex with anything
you could get a hold of). mmm... i've said too much now. i just wanted to
show that the bible is not something to be taken literally. i'm not dissing
the christian faith or the moral ground that christians, jews or anyone else
take, only proving that the bible is not a good basis for history. my facts
come from research into the era and from a book called "don't know much about
the bible" in which the author actually studies the original materials the
bible is based on including such artifacts as the dead sea scrolls, etc. and
then explains what the bible originally said.
sorry about my ranting, i've one more thing to say and i'll try to be brief.
there is no such thing as a "fact" persay. virtually everything science has
ever proved is not necessarily true. a scientists goal in their work is to
test everything. when one particular theory or another work often it becomes
a scientific law. such as relativity, opposites attract (magnetically
speaking), even that the earth revolves around the sun. any true scientist
uses these as a working hypothesis until it can be proved otherwise and
when/if it is proved otherwise then they ammend their theorys to include all
the available data. yeah, we say the earth revolves around the sun and have a
lot of damn evidence to prove that this is so, but if we sent out new
satellites that proved that not to be the case than, after thoroughly making
sure that it wasn't a technical malfunction, we'd have to incorporate a new
scientific law to work with that data. religion is much the same way in that
no matter how much proof you may have or may not have one way or the other, a
proper, true religion is willing to change its belief system to incorporate
whatever new data they have. a good example of this is that one of the majour
things that pope john paul II did in his reign as head of teh catholic church
was to accept evolution as the way people came to being. we've made evolution
happen in labs. it's been proven as much as anything can be. john paul
basically said "ok, we're not totally stupid, evolution happened. we were
wrong. sorry. my bad." i really respect him for doing that and feel that all
systems of belief, be they athiest, fundamentalist, historical, scientific or
anything else, should be willing to change and mold with the data that comes
in. ok... i'll shut up now. sorry about the length of this post. um. the
mouse rules. they kicked ass live. does anyone know if eric has shaved off
that ugly ass beard since i saw them in october? uh. bye for now.
-trompe le rick
