Another Atheist...

[Mommyof02green]

Ok, so faith can also be called a theological virtue. How does THAT prove it is given to the soul by God? What is the soul? As I said, I think this question is too important to take on faith. My definition of faith anyway.

I’m not sure on how you define faith, but I can tell you how I define it.

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1; New American Standard)

 

[phooney]

@Socrates4Jesus

One of my sources is Israel Finkelstein Professor of the Archaeology of Israel in the Bronze Age and Iron Ages at Tel Aviv University, in particular his book “The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts”, and he is also interviewed a couple of times on a bbc documentary I saw a while ago called “Who Wrote the Bible” , which I notice is available in 12 chunks on youtube, if you want to have a look, here is part 1:

youtube.com/watch?v=lbC_Bg1H-BI

Please forgive the cheesy start of the documentary and the presenter’s overly enthusiastic hand gesturing, it’s actually quite good once it gets going lol

In an extreme nutshell, the arguments about 4 sources for the pentateuch are such things as Deuteronomy describing Moses’ death in reasonably good detail and in past tense. Different versions of the same stories like the creation stories and the flood stories. Calling God by different names in the different books. Describing God with different personalities and ways of dealing with people. Different books being concerned with different territories. Linguistic differences.

Hope you find these sources interesting.

 

[phooney]

@grandfather

Is that Anthony Flew you’re talking about?

 

[Socrates4Jesus]

@Socrates4Jesus … a bbc documentary I saw a while ago called “Who Wrote the Bible” , which I notice is available in 12 chunks on youtube, if you want to have a look, here is part 1:

youtube.com/watch?v=lbC_Bg1H-BI

… Hope you find these sources interesting.

Phooney:

Your suggestion was that Moses might not be the author of the first five books of the Bible. As proof of this, the narrator of the video to which you referred me said this:

The christian in me wants to believe that Moses wrote the Bible and that from being in this kind of environment [of the Sinai desert] he heard the voice of God and was able to write things down. But the historian within me questions that and wonders whether it is actually possible for somebody to write down that amount of literature on such as vast amount of subjects in this place.

I suppose in response i’d say that Moses spent more than 40 years wandering in the desert as the leader of the Jewish people who fled Egypt. It seems to me that would be plenty of time to pen what today comprises about 230 pages. I also think the accounts in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are so detailed that it is highly unlikely that anyone not living through them could (or would attempt) to record them accurately. If it was not Moses who wrote these events, then it was someone close to him who was careful to document each event like a court or government secretary.

I doubt the video narrator’s doubt about Moses’ authorship of the first five books!



If there are other reasons for accepting his skeptical view, i’d be glad to discuss them with you.

 

[Socrates4Jesus]

Phooney:

For the sake of keeping the discussion clear, concise and cogent, i’d like to ask this: What in your opinion is the one strongest proof that the biblical text is historically unreliable?

 

[phooney]

S4J:

“I doubt the video narrator’s doubt about Moses’ authorship of the first five books!”

Haha! Fair point regarding his comment, seemed rather a strange thing to say to me too. However, I didn’t intend to cite the narrator as my source, I wanted to point out that Israel Finkelstein was interviewed a couple times in that documentary. His evidence is primarily of the archaeological kind. In regards to 40 years of the people wandering the desert… they left behind no evidence (that I have been made aware of anyway) But I digress, we were talking about authorship rather than the wandering.

I gave the extreme nutshell version of some of the arguments in my previous post.

I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak, in regards to biblical errancy.

 

[Socrates4Jesus]

S4J:

“I doubt the video narrator’s doubt about Moses’ authorship of the first five books!”

Haha! Fair point regarding his comment, seemed rather a strange thing to say to me too. However, I didn’t intend to cite the narrator as my source, I wanted to point out that Israel Finkelstein was interviewed a couple times in that documentary. His evidence is primarily of the archaeological kind. In regards to 40 years of the people wandering the desert… they left behind no evidence (that I have been made aware of anyway) But I digress, we were talking about authorship rather than the wandering.

I gave the extreme nutshell version of some of the arguments in my previous post.

I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak, in regards to biblical errancy.

The thing about a discussion thread like this is that if you don’t intentionally narrow your goal in a conversation it can become impossible to follow with any coherence. I’d rather thoughtfully discuss one beautiful tree than take on a discussion about the entire forest of this topic!

If you could give me one thing this fellow said that you find most compelling, we can discuss that. This will also help me look for his comments on this one topic in the video you recommended.

 

[Socrates4Jesus]

Phooney:

I’m not looking for a drawn out debate (unless you would enjoy one)! I’m just extremely interested in the reasons why you find the Old or New Testaments historically unreliable. I like to put my own ideas to the test. It’s a Christian thing:

Each one should test his own actions. Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else…
– Paul (Galatians, chapter 6)