How did it come to be there are different races of people

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Continuation of the Commentary (Part 2 of 2):
  • [10:2] Gomer: the Cimmerians; Madai: the Medes; Javan: the Greeks.
  • [10:3] Ashkenaz: an Indo-European people, which later became the medieval rabbinic name for Germany. It now designates one of the great divisions of Judaism, Eastern European Yiddish-speaking Jews.
  • [10:4] Elishah: Cyprus; the Kittim: certain inhabitants of Cyprus; the Rodanim: the inhabitants of Rhodes.
  • [10:6] Cush: biblical Ethiopia, modern Nubia. Mizraim: Lower (i.e., northern) Egypt; Put: either Punt in East Africa or Libya.
  • [10:8] Cush: here seems to be Cossea, the country of the Kassites; see note on 2:10–14. Nimrod: possibly Tukulti-Ninurta I (thirteenth century B.C.), the first Assyrian conqueror of Babylonia and a famous city-builder at home.
  • [10:10] Shinar: the land of ancient Babylonia, embracing Sumer and Akkad, present-day southern Iraq, mentioned also in 11:2; 14:1.
  • [10:11] Rehoboth-Ir: lit., “wide-streets city,” was probably not the name of another city, but an epithet of Nineveh; cf. Jon 3:3.
  • [10:12] Calah: Assyrian Kalhu, the capital of Assyria in the ninth century B.C.
  • [10:14] The Pathrusim: the people of Upper (southern) Egypt; cf. Is 11:11; Jer 44:1; Ez 29:14; 30:13. Caphtorim: Crete; for Caphtor as the place of origin of the Philistines, cf. Dt 2:23; Am 9:7; Jer 47:4.
  • [10:15] Heth: the biblical Hittites; see note on 23:3.
  • [10:21] Eber: the eponymous ancestor of the Hebrews, that is, the one to whom they traced their name.
  • [10:25] In the Hebrew text there is a play on the name Peleg and the word niplega , “was divided.”
 
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Rabbi said:
This is the fundamental problem with this and every logical argument for the disproved existence of G-d. There is a gigantic jump in logic here. This is called a “no god of the gaps” argument and it is a logical fallacy. You can’t just say “I don’t know why X, happens, therefore there must be no G-d”.

I’m afraid its not that simple. We don’t just jump to conclusions, but why did generations contemplate G-d for centuries? The simply reason they did, means something.
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It is a very natural conclusion from this that humans have a fundamental irrational need to attribute “God” as an explanation for the unknown. It’s the same reason Bill O’Reilly, an educated person, can look at someone and say “I don’t know why the tides go in and out, therefore it must be a god”. And then when told about how the moon causes the tides, says “Well how did the moon get there?” This defines God as an ever-receding shadow of human ignorance, which is why I don’t like this ‘god of the gaps’ reasoning.

Look at it this way, we all believe that billions of people worship gods that don’t exist, whether we are Christians who think Hindus worship nonexistent gods or Buddhists who think Muslims worship a nonexistent god or atheists who think everyone worships imaginary gods. Worshiping imaginary gods is something that humans apparently do, very often, unless you think all proposed gods exist in some sort of universalist sense.
Rabbi said:
And America killed 80,000 men, women, and children.
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And it is considered quite evil, even in that limited sense.
 
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Well, I hope that you can cite the teaching of the Church before you leave.
 
I fail to see how you come to the conclusion that God would be a liar if the flood mentioned in Genesis were a local flood - and by local, let’s talk about the size of the Bonneville flood: it covered 32,000 square miles; when it breached it sent a 410 high flood crest. At the [peak of the flood, approximately 33,000,000 cubic feet per second was flooding the area. The force of the water carved a 600 foot deep canyon on the Snake river a well as other canyons (Bruneau River and Salmon Falls Creek)

This occurred during or near the end of the ice age, which was something in the order of 13,000 to 15,000 years ago.You seem to be taking the matter as history as we understand history (which people at the time of the earliest scripture writers did not) and you might want to back up a couple of chapters in Genesis and read about say, the generations from Adam to Noah; and matters concerning earth and the heavens (the world being essentially flat, with a dome over the top).

Do those stories make God a liar? I think not; nor does it make the ancient writers to be liars.

The earliest Hebrew scripture appears to have been written about 1000 to 1100 years before Christ before Christ. The Ice age is about 13,000 to 15000 years before Christ. To assume that the writer of Genesis knew that the world s=consisted of more than a fairly large area of the Near/Middle East is to either make the writer a liar (flat world with dome), or to concede that something had occurred in the area thousands of years before which was conveyed through more than one societal unit (the Gilgamesh story has parallels) by stories handed down generation to generation.

There is evidence indicating that Alaska was populated 25,000 years ago; there is no evidence world wide of such a flood, through there is evidence of very large local floods. None of that whatsoever makes God to be a liar; the writers were writing about man’s relationship to God. In other words, they were writing theology rather than history as we understand it today. One does not need to believe, for example, that there was a specific person named Jonah; the story is not about history; it is about sin and repentance (theology).

I don’t doubt the flood (the story of which appears to be told both by Hebrew Scriptures and the story of Gilgamesh) was a huge flood. Evidence does not indicate the whole world was flooded all at the same time. That does not mean that the Hebrews (and their ancestors before there was a select tribe) did not have an on-going relationship with God which was revealed, bit by bit, over time. That is what scripture is about.
 
Realize that science itself is the pursuit of truth about the natural world; thus every field studies nature to unlock its secrets. So yes, the purpose of the human intellect is Truth. The point of human reason itself is for discovering the meaning and goal of life—namely the salvation of your soul.

The big question then for the atheist is this: What evidence would suffice?

One will readily find that for an atheist, no evidence will suffice. But evidence there is, and it’s plentiful-in fact it’s everywhere. There’s even plenty of evidence of life after death as there are thousands of cases of people who have died and back to life reporting being fully conscious, aware of experiencing spiritual realities of fear and evil, or goodness peace and love, even after being clinically dead.

Again, there is nothing about glass, plastic or metal that produces the rational information coming out of your cellphone, the source of the rational information is outside of the material itself. The same applies to your brain, which is made up of oxygen, carbon , hydrogen, nitrogen, and calcium. There’s nothing about those substances that produces rational information. The source is outside of the material itself.

As for atheism being an emotional psychological state, there are plenty of studies on that. For example, look up The Psychology of Atheism, by Prof.Paul C Vitz.

But modern science itself makes the case for God; do realize that The Big Bang Theory, which is the foundation of modern astronomy, confirms a reality ooutside of time and matter itself. Scientists will tell you that Time and Matter came into existence with the “Big Bang”; thus the cause of Time and Matter is outside of time and Matter itself—in other words eternal. Likewise the cause of Matter itself is outside of matter itself—in other words ryrnal and Spiritual… But the concepts of eternity and spirit sound like A foreign language to anyone U.N. familiar with the language of theology and philosophy. The good news is that the cosmos did not bubble up accidentally and there is a real purpose for your existence.

Here is a short clip you might appreciate:
 
No, a better response would simply be that we need G-d psychologically, but you didn’t use it, so you can’t claim it now! Steal! Is G-d the ever reaching shadow of human ignorance? Not so. Modern science is. Look here, I want you to get out a white piece of paper. Now just put a dot in it. Now that white sheet is going to represent everything we’re going to know in the next few hundred years, and you wouldn’t even be able to phantom what’s in that dot. Follow me? So how do you know… a n y t h i n g ?

Anything? How do you know what science will find? Perhaps it will PROVE G-d, and the gap theory will go in the trash. No one knows, so it’s arrogant to say you do. We all know science, like most all of psychology, can easily be turned on it’s head (or else it wouldn’t be science)! So you don’t know anything about the future and what’s going to happen. Simple as that.

Think of it this way: WHY do humans worship G-d? Why did we create, or think up, or reasoned, or whatever you want to call it, decide there is life after death? …Um? Perhaps these kinds of things are innate in us? To probe them? Just the abstract idea of a G-d wouldn’t have come about on its own, something has to be true to have made us wonder, do you follow me here?

Understand this, the people who died at Sodom were… pretty bad. Would you want a rapist to just be off the hook? Now you see why G-d punished them!
 
Rabbi said:
No, a better response would simply be that we need G-d psychologically, but you didn’t use it, so you can’t claim it now! Steal! Is G-d the ever reaching shadow of human ignorance? Not so. Modern science is. Look here, I want you to get out a white piece of paper. Now just put a dot in it. Now that white sheet is going to represent everything we’re going to know in the next few hundred years, and you wouldn’t even be able to phantom what’s in that dot. Follow me? So how do you know… a n y t h i n g ?

Anything? How do you know what science will find? Perhaps it will PROVE G-d, and the gap theory will go in the trash. No one knows, so it’s arrogant to say you do. We all know science, like most all of psychology, can easily be turned on it’s head (or else it wouldn’t be science)! So you don’t know anything about the future and what’s going to happen. Simple as that.

Think of it this way: WHY do humans worship G-d? Why did we create, or think up, or reasoned, or whatever you want to call it, decide there is life after death? …Um? Perhaps these kinds of things are innate in us? To probe them? Just the abstract idea of a G-d wouldn’t have come about on its own, something has to be true to have made us wonder, do you follow me here?

Understand this, the people who died at Sodom were… pretty bad. Would you want a rapist to just be off the hook? Now you see why G-d punished them!
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So you don’t know everything, surely, so does that mean that somewhere in the stuff you do not know there is proof that the God of Abraham isn’t real and Hinduism is true? No honest person says they know 100% absolutely any of these things, but just because you are not 100% certain doesn’t mean you can’t believe one thing or another.

I didn’t say anything about Sodom.
 
No, the Torah is true, Hinduism is a deviation of Torah. Do you want to know how I know Judaism is true beyond a mere “the book says so”? Here’s how, but you have to watch the whole film, over 2 hours to understand it. Luckily, for your sake, he doesn’t do it in Hebrew. Please enjoy and let me know you’re thoughts. You will walk away with a kippa on your head after this! If not, its where G-d wanted you to be, unlike other faiths out there, we don’t say you’re go to hell for not being a Jew. That’s just plain ridiculous. Judaism never taught this. We go by logic, not by fear.

Again, please enjoy the film and let me know your thoughts.

 
You’re making an awful lot of categorical assertions which again I have to insist strongly disagree with my own experience.

For life after “death”, this depends a lot on what we’re calling dead, because clinical death doesn’t necessarily mean cessation of brain activity, and one’s own perceptions, especially of time, are highly, highly suspect in such experiences due to shock. I’m not sure that many of these ‘near-death experiences’ are even theologically valid. As far as ‘experiencing realities of fear and evil or goodness, peace and love’, people have those feelings even when they’re alive, I’m not sure why they become more trustworthy when they are in a state of shock or semi-consciousness.

The source of information being outside the material itself or what came ‘before’ the Big Bang, both big cases of this ‘God of the Gaps’ non sequitur I’m talking about.

And of course the biggest thing not even addressed by all this is the fact that the vast majority of atheists in the world are Chinese people who don’t even give the Abrahamic God half a thought. All of them aren’t Christians because of a lack of father figures? Ridiculous, and a bad faith approach to people who hold other views.
 
Sorry, I can’t get through five minutes of this video, the style is just too grating on me and he seems to be making all kinds of goofy logical jumps.
 
And you’re logical jump? That there’s no G-d? Why don’t you want there to be a G-d? Do you wish there was one? Don’t you want a moral compass, objective truth, to see your loved ones’ again? Why are you against all this?

Do you want violence and chaos? Do you want to feel incomplete, and without purpose? Its your choice, I’m not going to stop you.

There’s a famous joke. An atheist walks up to a rabbi, and he’s being real obnoxious, screaming in his face and all, saying how there’s no G-d and this is it, and that when he dies he turns to worms and the whole salesmanship. Well, after the screaming’s over and there’s a pause, the rabbi looks at him, and retorts, “Thank G-d!”

Haha, he’s thanking G-d this obnoxious person won’t be around in the after life, you get it?
Look, if you’re not even going to give the film a chance, why bother with this conversation? There’s no use, we’ll go in circles and I’m not going to type out each proof for you, piece by piece. Please give it a chance or this can’t go on. I’m not one to talk much with atheists, I don’t really have the background to do so unless you see the proofs the rabbi offers. You know, it’s ever free! Just get some popcorn and relax and watch it, there’s no harm in it. If you end up disagreeing, then so what, you wasted 2 hours of your time. Big deal.
 
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I’m not against any of this, I’m against bad logic.

I love new ideas but the style of the video was just grating and obnoxious to me.
 
Please give it another go or this conversation is terminated because it has run its course.
 
Yeah it’s terminated because there’s no way I’m watching a 2+hour video of some dude yelling “Look at this thing made by humans! Isn’t it complicated??? It was designed! Look at this other thing made by humans! Isn’t it complicated??? It was designed! Therefore, everything we see in nature that is complicated was designed by a humanlike intelligence!” over really loud, annoying music and a bunch of stock footage.
 
Say what you want about it, the film is a masterpiece to me. You know what’s annoying? A T H E I S T S…

They’re really annoying, like stubbing your toe at night.

Ok, just watch the first 50 minutes, that’s everything that covers the scientific side of Torah, ok, there’s actually more he didn’t covered but its a good amount. Last shot, will you watch just 50 minutes?

We all know the design argument is the best by the way. No one can answer against it. Not even you.
 
Atreju said:
Isn’t it complicated??? It was designed! Look at this other thing made by humans! Isn’t it complicated??
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Just look at a plant cell, all the little parts. That made itself? Haha! What, you take me for a fool?
 
You are happy to live in a cold, dark universe where there is no love, no hope. It’s why we Jews stay away as best we can from debating your type. It does nothing. Meanwhile, we people of faith will go on living a life of hope and warmth, knowing Hashem exists. There is no reason to argue with atheists, they’re minds are made up.

Just remember this: you cannot prove G-d anymore than you can disprove Him. You should replicate us, we show mercy and warmth towards everyone because we believe in making the world a better place.
 
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