"You HAVE to believe in God" - My mum.

Post Reply New Topic

Don't spit in my face and tell me it's raining.

I'm not stupid, nor am I ignorant. I've been to Seminary, and I have a working knowledge of both Hebrew and Greek.

Those are objective errors, not mere translation artifacts.

Why do you call your parents mom and dad? I mean, why them and not two total strangers? This is completely arbitrary. Who cares about family trees and degrees of relationship, right? Speaking of trees, you might as well call a tree "dad" if genetic similarities don't matter at all.

And who knows, perhaps the ancient Hebrews did just that? If "bird" meant something other than "creature with feathers and a beak" in their language, how could we possibly translate any ancient text? Who knows how many other words had an entirely different meaning. The Bible might be a collection of erotic stories for all we know.

EDIT: hey, I know I'm not a mod or anything, but can we all agree to take this conversation about the three Bible passages to Fnord's thread in PPR, called "An Assertion..."? It's getting confusing having two threads.

No, they're not objective errors. Classification systems are arbitrary and differ from culture to culture and from local indigenous tribes to international scientific communities.

It'd be an error if the OT states that bats are birds according to the most popular scientific classification system of today.

any cultural classification might be arbitrary but the scientific ones are the same no matter what you call them,

now what any one particular society follows is another matter but as mentioned before if the passages were written with any kind of divine inspiration shouldnt they simply state it as is?
it would be how the world actually worked, regardless of the hebrew language.

I call my parents "mom" and "dad" because that is what the English language of today leads me to call them. I can, however, choose to call a couple of other strangers "mom" and "dad" if they act like my parents. Doesn't necessarily make it wrong.

No, I won't call a tree "dad" because it doesn't go well with the modern English language that I know of. However, if you have a very good linguistic reason to call a tree "dad", I won't have a problem with it.



Bird is an English word. Bats are put in the same category as the other "birds" in the biblical Hebrew system because they have wings. Nothing to do with feathers, eggs, or whatever.

But it's humans who decided how to classify animals for the scientific system. Were I believer, I could've argued that God doesn't need to submit himself to how humans of today classify animals. There is no objectively "as it is" in this context.

It all depends on the intent and the point being made. The OT doesn't aim to teach modern evolutionary science to Jews of the past. It's mainly written for spiritual and legal purposes that just can't really be applied as much in today's world and age. Making a big deal out of "bats are birds" just to demonstrate that the Bible has errors is missing the point of such verses/passages. God, pretending that he really did inspire the OT, wasn't aiming to tell the Hebrews that bats are, evolutionarily speaking, birds in the distant future system of animal classification. The whole point was to let them know what to eat and what not to eat and so forth. That is all.

Look, I get what you're saying. Colloquial language is not very accurate and employs unscientific terms like "bugs" and "them ugly critters". It is also anatomically inaccurate, seeing that people still regard the heart as the seat of emotions.

The ancient Hebrews assumed that people thought with their heart and felt emotions in their kidneys. The Hebrew word for kidneys has therefore been deliberately mistranslated as "mind", even in otherwise accurately translated Bible versions, because "god reads your kidneys" would probably elicit hysterical laughter in Sunday school

The modern zoological taxonomy, however, is quite accurate and definitely not arbitrary, just like our modern knowledge of the human anatomy. It is based on degrees of genetic relationship and evolutionary lineage.

Now, if the creator of the universe were to write or dictate a book that contains his message to all extant and future generations of humanity, I would expect it to be at least as accurate as anything that human biologists have come up with. Otherwise there is no reason to believe that a divine being was involved in the authorship of the Bible.

My sister calls me an Agnostic, and my Mom just doesn't say anything. My Grandfather hasn't given me any problems, but he will probably lecture me in the future. I think my Mother knows that I've been viewing Atheist materials, but I'm not sure about that. My father is an Atheist who goes to church. He doesn't worship God, so I don't get why he attends what he really doesn't like. I told my sister that the next time a certain young bigot and sexist PIG we know gives a lesson, she should let our Dad fall into another deep sleep, so that he makes snoring noises through church.



Edit: I'm not grammar talented.

Last edited by LiendaBalla on 18 Feb 2012, 12:02 am, edited 2 times in total.

It's arbitrary. Based on an agreement that the system be based on "DNA-relatedness". Very valid and scientific agreement, yes. But still arbitrary.

Is it the most reasonable classification system we have thus far? I'd say "yes". Is it objectively the right one and all other systems (past, present, and future) wrong? My answer would be "no".

Like I said, if the biological taxonomy is arbitrary, so is regarding your parents as your parents. They fathered you / gave birth to you. Their second-degree relationship can be empirically proven. If that is arbitrary for you, we simply have very different definitions of arbitrariness and should probably agree to disagree on this matter.

My parents had sex in order to give birth to me. Semantically, they're arbitrarily considered to be my parents, but they're also biologically (and, therefore, objectively) the ones who gave birth to me.

When it comes to classifying animals, scientists had to come up with their own rules upon which to base their classifications of animals.

A seagull is classified as a bird by today's scientists because of the rules of the system that make the seagull fit the criteria for birds in the system. A bat is classified as a mammal because of the same rules of the system.

Who came up with the rules? Humans (as in scientists). It wasn't grounded solidly within something external in nature. Therefore, they had to agree upon the rules themselves.

read up on actual taxonomy,

it would be the same no matter who, where and when did the examination.

True; reality never changes, only our understanding of it.

This "actual" taxonomy is based on rules that humans came up with.

and that is where your understanding differs from reality,

they are classed by their evolutionary traits and their genetics, something that anyone anywhere with any cultural background on any planet would find if they used the same methods,

that means that no matter how you look at it it is not merely "by human rules" but actually a fact of reality.