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Posted: 2008-01-17 02:00pm
by Mayabird
Re: End of the World

Ever notice how, whenever there's a big flood or a volcano or some disaster like that, people still usually say something like "I thought the world was ending" or "It was like the world was ending." Even today, right now, when people should damn well know better than to think that a flood washing away their town, no matter how personally traumatizing, actually is destroying the entire world, people still think that, at some level. For most people, at some innate level, "the world" is just the general area around them.

Also, note expressions like "someone's whole world was destroyed" when something bad happens. It doesn't mean the planet blew up. It means that person's family died, or their homestead got burned down, or something along those lines. Personally terrible, but in the grand scheme of things, trivial.

Now, let's take this and apply this to people who don't know better. They don't know that they're living on a very large spheroid with millions of other people and lands they've never heard. They may never leave the general vicinity of the village where they were born. It IS their entire world, and small areas are relatively easy to utterly destroy. One major flood, one big freaking storm, a wildfire, the local lord thinks that humans would be the ultimate game, etc. That's the destruction of their concept of the entire world.

Why else would peasants gawk when they went to the city? They're getting their minds blown. "Everybody" just multiplied from the couple hundred people around their village to thousands. Their village was everything, their entire world, and now, their entire world just looks very small and shabby.

Posted: 2008-01-17 02:46pm
by Darth Wong
In the beginning of Genesis, it says that before the Earth was created, God "hovered over the waters". It's pretty obvious that "the Earth" in this context was merely the dirt, and the planet itself already exists.

It's all well and good to say "suspension of disbelief", but this is a literary work rather than a photograph, so it is necessarily interpretive, and when they say things that literally don't make any sense at all, you can't take them literally, even for something silly like this thread scenario.

Posted: 2008-01-17 03:01pm
by Ace Pace
Darth Wong wrote:In the beginning of Genesis, it says that before the Earth was created, God "hovered over the waters". It's pretty obvious that "the Earth" in this context was merely the dirt, and the planet itself already exists.
Nitpick, as I think I pointed out before, the original hebrew states that the earth/water/sea was created before god "hovers over the waters". :?

Posted: 2008-01-17 05:10pm
by Darth Wong
Ace Pace wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:In the beginning of Genesis, it says that before the Earth was created, God "hovered over the waters". It's pretty obvious that "the Earth" in this context was merely the dirt, and the planet itself already exists.
Nitpick, as I think I pointed out before, the original hebrew states that the earth/water/sea was created before god "hovers over the waters". :?
Does it still say that stupid shit about God dividing the night and day before he created the Sun, despite the fact that even primitive man was quite aware that the Sun is necessary for the cycle of night and day?

Posted: 2008-01-18 12:17am
by Ace Pace
Lets try translating the first five verses.
1:In the beggining, god created, the skies and the land. 2: And the earth was chaos and darkness over the abyss(chasm? land?) and the spirt of god, hovering over the water. 3: And god said, Let there be light, and there was light 4: And god saw the light, and said it was good; and god differanced between light and darkness. 5: And god calls the light day, and the darkness he called night and there be evening and there be morning, one day.
So, yes.

Posted: 2008-01-18 12:43am
by Junghalli
Reading literally from that quote it sounds maybe like God started out with an icy rogue planet, then warmed it enough to liquify the ice and give it an atmosphere, then resculpted the terrain to give it continents, then put it into orbit of a convenient sunlike star, then adjusted its rotation to give it a day/night cycle that would permit Earthlike conditions.

That is, if you try to read it literally, extrapolate it into modern scientific concepts, and chosing relatively conservative (i.e. easy) series of feats it would involve (i.e. putting a pre-existing planet in orbit of a pre-existing sun instead of creating either one from scratch).

Basically I'd say if we try to bludgeon it into a scientific description it sounds like a rather advanced terraforming project.

Posted: 2008-01-18 02:28am
by Patrick Degan
Zuul wrote:
Patrick Degan wrote: 8)
There we go.
—with even more of your bullshit in this thread, it appears.
Um, the OP is not confirming Revelation. The OP is confiming the Old Testament version of God as a tyrant willing to break his covenants when the mood takes him.
Which is...what Phelps believes, along with the majority of humanity going to Hell, all humanity outside his little cult in fact.
Which has... nothing to do with what is actually said in Revelation, no matter how many times you try to say otherwise.
An eschatology which isn't universally accepted even amongst Christian denominations, particulary the Catholic Church and rejected by Judiasm altogether but which you have attempted to extend as applying as prophecy to the modern world which its author could not have conceived of. You're the last person to accuse anybody of dishonesty or ignorance.
You are dishonest or ignorant since you equivocated between all eschatology and Revelation.
Lie.
You even do it in the above quote and you still don't seem to understand what you're being accused of. If it were rejected by judaism altogether, there wouldn't be any apocalyptic jewish texts, and there are.
Wrong. If it's Ezekiel you're referring to, once more —that book was speaking to the downfall of the Jewish kingdom at the hands of Babylon in his era (c. 589BCE) and is not regarded as a reference to the modern world except by apocalypse nutters. Furthermore, it is quite likely that the so-called "prophecy" was false even at the time it was cobbled together:

Linky
It has already been shown that the editors gathered together ‘prophecies' that contradicted each other on the subject of the law, and then edited them together and attributed them to a single prophet. In this way the more radical statements of the prophets, while preserved, as was the custom, could be ‘watered down' by including statements alleged to be by a single individual and which strongly supported traditional religious practices (even such extreme statements as those found in ‘Trito- Isaiah' even though, as I pointed out, these passages contradict other statements found in the same part of the book of Isaiah). It became a traditional priestly dogma that the law books were to be held to have the greatest authority and that prophets were to be ranked in second place. That certain prophets held that prophets had authority to reject the law books is obvious when you read what certain prophets had to say about the law. If prophets were to be demoted and law books promoted then it seems to be the case that if prophets made ‘false prophecies' then there could be no better way to show that prophets need not always be taken seriously. They obviously made errors (and thus needed to be interpreted ‘in the light of the law books'). Prophets could be nullified and silenced by introducing favorable prophecies and then claiming that the prophets were not radical, but rather they wanted ‘sincere animal sacrifices' (for example). This was exactly the dogma that developed and in the process clear statements by the prophets were nullified in the process of ‘interpretation'. (As Joshua was given to say in the gospels, ‘you have a fine way of nullifying the prophets for the sake of your traditional doctrines, and you do many other things like that.' ( Matthew Chapter 15 verse 6, Mark Chapter 7 verse 13)

Perhaps the best example of a false prophecy edited into the book of a prophet, a false prophecy that was known to be false when the manuscript was edited, is found in the book of Ezekiel.

"I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring many nations against you, like the sea casting up its waves. They will scrape away her rubble and make her a bare rock. Out in the sea she will become a place to spread fishnets, for I have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD. She will become plunder for the nations, and her settlements on the mainland will be ravaged by the sword. For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: From the north I am going to bring against Tyre Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, with horsemen and a great army. He will ravage your settlements on the mainland with the sword; he will set up siege works against you, build a ramp up to your walls and raise his shields against you. He will direct the blows of his battering rams against your walls and demolish your towers with his weapons. His horses will be so many that they will cover you with dust. Your walls will tremble at the noise of the war horses, wagons and chariots when he enters your gates as men enter a city whose walls have been broken through. The hoofs of his horses will trample all your streets; he will kill your people with the sword, and your strong pillars will fall to the ground. They will plunder your wealth and loot your merchandise; they will break down your walls and demolish your fine houses and throw your stones, timber and rubble into the sea. I will put an end to your noisy songs, and the music of your harps will be heard no more. I will make you a bare rock, and you will become a place to spread fishnets. You will never be rebuilt, for I YAHWEH have spoken, declares the Sovereign LORD. " (Ezekiel Chapter 26 verse 3)

This was a false prophecy. Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Tyre from 585-573 B.C.E. but was unable to take the city. Tyre was conquered in 332 B.C.E. by Alexander but at no time was the city destroyed. It exists to this day. According to the false prophecy found in Ezekiel, Nebuchadnezzar was supposed to completely destroy Tyre, it was never to be rebuilt again, but to remain an eternal ruin, and the King was supposed to get much wealth and loot from the city, making it worth his while. Another false prophecy follows in Ezekiel. Nebuchadnezzar did not conquer Tyre, the prophet admits, and neither did he make a thin dime from the attempt. Therefore, the prophet proceeds to make another false prophecy, this time proclaiming destruction of Egypt at the King's hands, as a sort of consolation prize for not looting Tyre as was prophesied previously. This looting of Egypt at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar never happened either. The prophet stated that the King would make such a ruin of Egypt that no one would live there for ‘forty years'. This never happened. It is another false prophesy attributed to the prophet after the prophet had just previously made a false prophecy (one false prophecy after another). What actually happened is that Nebuchadnezzar attacked Egypt twice, once in 588 and again in 568 and was luckless both times.

The prophet admits that Nebuchadnezzar was luckless in his campaign against Tyre, and contrary to what was prophesied, did not loot Tyre. He then promised the ruin of Egypt and all its treasures, and this did not happen either.

. . .

It is a common polemical technique to insist that such prophecies 'are yet to be fulfilled' but when you actually read them you can see that the time for them to be fulfilled has long past. A similar technique is used to 'delay' the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning Babylon, but as the prophets stated, for example, Jeremiah, Babylon would be destroyed 'after the return from exile' and would be 'destroyed and ruined forever.' This did not happen, and the time frame for fulfilling the prophecy is long over. Furthermore, the 'seventy years of exile' prophecy was itself a false prophecy. Jerusalem fell in 586 B.C.E. Cyrus allowed the Jewish people to return in 539, which means that exile lasted for 47 years, not seventy as the prophecy states. That the prophecy of 'destruction of Babylon forever' after 'the seventy years of exile are over' also turned out to be a falsehood is not surprising. The statement in Chronicles is also false which states that 'the land enjoyed a Sabbath for seventy years' while the people were in exile, 'to fulfill the words of the prophet Jeremiah'. (2 Chronicles Chapter 36 verse 21)
Basically, such Jewish "prophecies" were attempts to reconcile the notion of Israel's supposed status as the Chosen nation with the unfortunate fact that it had gotten rolled over by the local empire.
I'm not evading anything. You claimed God had shot his load, I pointed out that many of the oldest biblical texts contain the future destruction of the Earth, and this apocalypticism is present in the various religions.
See above.
YOU were the one who labeled Revelation as the culmination of Judaeo-Christian religious philosophy, you dishonest fuck.
No, I gave it as an example. I also gave Isaiah as an example when it was claimed that such notions were separate from judaism.
Again, see above.
Everyone dies in judeo-christian eschatology.

—which YOU used in an attempted rebuttal regarding the applicability of Revelation to the modern world and proceeded to defend against Molyneux's objections as well.
Quite rightly, too.
Quite wrongly, actually, as has been pointed out to you.
The problem with your little attempt at an argument is that Jesus' words are vague to the point of meaninglessness, rather like all prophecies. Also, he is referring to his own generation in his own time, and quite clearly, everything was not fulfilled and his generation did pass away to be replaced by succeeding generations which also never saw any of the prophecy come to pass.
Firstly, his prophecies aren't meaningless, they have a perfectly understandable meaning as even you can manage to identify them as false. This wouldn't be the case if they weren't meaningful.
They are most certainly meaningless, as they utterly fail to yield anything like an accurate prediction of events even in his time and have zero relevance to any reality of our modern world.
Secondly, it would mean either Jesus was a false prophet, or it was a misquotation.
Or, it means he was speaking pure drivel.
And didn't. What's your point?
You do know the gospels were written before Revelation, right?
So pathetic that this doesn't even deserve a response.
You should try taking your own advice, as the OP is not confirming the view of Revelation but rather the Old Testament of Yahweh as a capricious tyrant.
Like in Isaiah then, that I already quoted in this thread, with another violent depiction of the end of the world, not dissimilar to revelation, like I've been pointing out again and again.
Violent depictions of the end of Israel. For some bizarre reason, however, the other nations never seem to get touched.
So again, what's your point? You can't have it both ways.
Revelation being false doesn't mean the other eschatological passages are. As I said to you ages ago, Revelation is not the be all and end all of judeo christian eschatology, it is an example of it. There's lots of others, too.
Oh no, Revelation went quite a bit beyond any of the Jewish prophecies and it is certainly not held by Jewish scholars to be any part of their relationship with God or indicative of their eventual fate.