conversion, fundamentalism, fundamentalist, fundy, atheism, atheist, religion, bible, prophet, prophecy, christian, jesus,
I haven't dealt with the "but the prophecies all get fulfilled" argument in favor of Christianity before, and this post gave me the perfect opportunity to do so.
I think Atheist do not understand what they are criticising oh yes we do. generally better than the people who believe in it, they are deceived into thinking they do oh, that's right, i need to read the bible to get faith, but i can't read the bible right without faith, and round and round we go but that is pure deception hmmm?
1) I have offered to stop being a Christian I don't want you to stop being christian. you are entirely welcome to your faith. just stop bashing me over the head with it, and we're fine. if any of the Atheist were to give me a failed prophecy from the old or the new testament? oh noes! the prophecies! they prove everything!
There are literally thousands of prophecies in both books and most of them are forward looking yeah, it's not a prophecy if it's not looking forward. at that point, it's a history lesson, but everyone every space one of them has been proven true sooner of or later. eventually, in the infinity that is the universe, anything is bound to happen. just wait for it.
For my misunderstanding Atheist friends, people like Jeremiah, Daniel, Moses etc. were called prophets for a reason, they were predicting the future. yes, we all know what "prophet" means. i am also quite familiar with Jeremiah, Daniel and Moses. I am not your friend.
2) Many modern so called sciences like Economics were they have tried to predict the future and look at their records despite their computer capabilities. We can put bible prophecy against every econometrics model and it still wins out, what does that even mean?
3) Books like Daniel send shivers up the spines of secular scholars that is why they try to attack that particular book. no, the book of Daniel does not send shivers up the spines, or legs, of any secular scholar. sorry.
My offer stands, show me the money! that was played out 10 years ago, and i don't think atheism wants you.
Some people have claimed that the claims of Christianity cannot be proved, I disagree I think you can test the validity of the claims. There is no such thing as blind faith in Christianity. yeah, there is
Take a book like psalm 22 - it predicts the death of the Messiah a thousand years before the event
okay, this almost sounds reasonable until you stop to consider one thing: the most recently written book of the bible is almost 2,000 years old. The Old Testament is significantly older than that. We don't have the original manuscripts of any portion of the bible. The bible has been translated many times by many different translators, most of them working off of copies of original manuscripts or previous translations.
It is not beyond reason to consider that, at some point, either the old prophecies were changed to matched the life of jesus, or the life of jesus was changed to match the old prophecies, or some combination of both. We'll never know, because there are no original manuscripts left.
And, really, this argument boils down to the statement that "my special book is internally consistent". So what? Harry Potter is internally consistent. So is the Lord of the Rings. Any book with a halfway decent editor is internally consistent. This is hardly convincing.
I give this a conversion fail.
Monday, February 9, 2009
5 comments:
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Regarding psalm 22:
ReplyDeleteWe can be pretty sure that psalm 22 was not modified in any way for Jesus. In general, texts in the Old Testament are close to identical to the Jewish versions. Since the Jews would not presumably change their holy texts to fit a messiah they didn't believe in you can eliminate that possibility. Modification of the life of Jesus is of course a possibility but there's a more compelling possibility if you look at the actual text of psalm 22: the psalm isn't talking about Jesus at all and isn't modified. In a straightforward reading of the psalm the psalmist in the first part of the psalm depicts his personal troubles. He then states that God is still with him and that eventually he and God's servants will triumph. In order to read this psalm as prophecying anything about Jesus requires distorting the words and reading them out of context.
can i have a linky on that one? (no snark, just curious.)
ReplyDeletei tend to leave interpretation alone, because apparently i just don't get it right. "love you neighbor" means love your neighbor to me.
i tend to agree with your interpretation. most of what people call prophecy in the bible, is only prophecy if you read it sideways.
A copy of the text in English can be found at:
ReplyDeleteA copy of the English text is at
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+22
Normally, I would link to the Hebrew also but in this case there's really no substantial differences for our purposes. The general thrust of the psalm is clear. Although I'll note that Unbound Bible is a great resource for this sort of thing. They have translations in pretty much every language along with most of the major codices, and you can put things side by side to compare them.
Actually, I just looked over the translation I linked to and its a bit crappy. It does however give the general gist.
ReplyDeletethat's okay, i can't read hebrew. will review soon. thanks!
ReplyDelete