Bible Prophecy
Taught Real Science
 Marie Parra

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From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Marie Parra"
Subject: Re: Positive_Atheism_Letters_Section
Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 5:04 AM

If these are the best you can come up with, your desperation is showing.
 

The Earth is not "suspended" or "hung" in any sense.

1. Our earliest extant copy of Job, a pagan piece of literature, was written (or copied) long after Aristotle proved that the Earth is a globe in the sixth century B.C.E. Greeks very accurately estimated the size of this globe during the fourth century B.C.E. They had figured out how far away from a perfect globe it is by the second century B.C.E.

2. It was not until Christianity became the law of the land that the Earth reverted to being flat again.

3. Copernicus was afraid of telling his views to anyone (which views, according to you, are supported by the Bible) because he knew the Christians would kill him. He was right. Galileo was arrested and forced to recant over 100 years after Columbus's voyage (1492), and several decades after Magellan's voyage, when the Pope himself divided up the Atlantic and the New World between Spain and Portugal.
 

Is this even close to what the book of Job is saying? or is Job rather talking about keeping the winds from going off the end of the flat Earth? or perhaps Job is talking about the force (weight) of a furious wind (as it says wind not air which you are saying has weight).
 

So, then, when I go to the Plasma Center and they take my blood out, is my "life" really in that whirly-ma-jig that extracts vital fluids from my blood? When they return only part of my blood, substituting salt water with what they removed, is part of me missing? And what happens when Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards goes through heroin detox and they replace all of his blood with somebody else's blood? Does he then become somebody else? do they become Keith Richards?

And what does it mean in Genesis 4 when Abel's blood cried from the ground? This passage is describing the animistic beliefs of the barbaric and primitive Hebrews, in that blood was actually a living thing, just as an Idol was a living thing. And people could give other people the "evil eye" (covet) and this act also had magical properties.

And the Earth was flat back then, too.
 

No nuclear device could possibly make the universe do anything but yawn. The forger of II Peter said "heavens," didn't he? so why are you talking about the Earth?
 

But you forgot the one about burying your fecal matter. In Deuteronomy 23, God tells the Hebrews to bury their doo-doo. Why? Because the micro-organisms could cause the spread of disease? No. He wanted them to do this because "the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of the camp." As Mark Twain and I both independently observed, He didn't want to step in it!
 

Besides, you'd be hard pressed to find anything even remotely resembling a description of Scientific Method, wherein all claims to fact are up for grabs, nobody is the arbiter of truth, and anybody is qualified to challenge any claim to truth. This model is the exact negation of the Bible's way of determining truth: brawn ("Believe what I tell you to believe or I'll throw you into the Christian Hell").
 

If you can come up with any better attempts at showing the Bible to be scientific, I'd gladly take them on. I strongly suggest that you find a superior source for your information than those Jack Chick comic books that you find in telephone booths across the land. Perhaps your local Bible store will have some good books explaining how the human eye is so perfectly designed -- with the nerves and blood vessels in front of the photosensitive cells. Or maybe they talk about the perfect angle of the tube that drains your ears into your throat -- which angle would be ideal were we still on all fours. Or maybe the design of the spinal column can be shown to be ideal -- again, for those who walk on all fours! Or perhaps one of these authors can explain why your God wrapped my urethra around my prostate (causing the premature deaths of more men than any other single cause -- and male dogs, too). And why did your God put extremely sensitive nerves inside your teeth? Inside the teeth!? I was just now given a reminder of this -- and that I need to visit my dentist real soon.

My actual suggestion: either go ahead and be a biblical fundamentalist and run with it, not attempting to understand why, or take some science courses. You can reconcile science with the god of Deism and the panentheistic god of Progressive Christianity, but you cannot reconcile science with a fundamentalistic reading of the Bible unless you do as the New International Version "translators" did and deliberately alter what their own God has told them. Even then, you're still woefully short of making the case you try to make here.

You might even consider becoming an atheist, because you really don't know that the Bible is true; you're only guessing, at best -- taking somebody else's word for it and not knowing for yourself. An atheist is someone who does not hold that gods exist -- not necessarily someone who asserts that gods do not exist. If you can show religion to be true, I'll become religious. If you cannot demonstrate your claim to be true, you best not go around telling people that it is true. To do that is an act of falsehood:

 

It is an established maxim and moral that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.
-- Abraham Lincoln, chiding the editor of a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper

 

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
     people with no reason to believe

Graphic Rule

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