Exalting Yahweh using Pagan imagery

Faith & Science Conversation
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Beaglelady. Stand down please. No culture war going on here, nothing to see …

This is me just trying to provide a particular perspective regarding an understanding and use of the term church.

Truth be told the perspective, in my humble opinion, which I’ve provided is pretty basic 101 NT theology.

And by the way, I agree doing portable church is a pain in the ass.

FYI I haven’t carefully read the entire thread. I guess we could engage in a 200 post battle royal about why portable or house churches or physical churches are the most biblical. I’ll pass on that cause it would be pretty boring … btw hats off to the marathon posters on the “is Jesus God” thread. Interesting read. All you posters deserve a special prize for longevity and civility

Blessings

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That’s exactly the problem. We are supposed to be the “sacred space.”

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Baal was not just an image. He was the same planet in every culture, the planet we all Jupiter. The Bible agrees with the pagans, not about their gods, but about a planet that was crushed, called Tiamut in Babylon. The Canaanite mentioned that the crushed planet had seven heads. The Greeks called it the seven headed crushed watery planet Hydra. The Bible refers to the crushed planet as Rahab, although it is not spelled in Hebrew like the woman Rahab, The planet Rahab evidently means the proud and mighty one.

The four references to the crushed planet are here:

Job 9:13-14 "God will not turn back His anger; Beneath Him crouch the helpers of Rahab. (14) "How then can I answer Him, And choose my words before Him?

Job here refers to a great battle when other planets milled about. In the Babylonians account of the battle, a moon of Jupiter crushed a great watery planet (Tiamut). Each major piece of the crushed planet sported a vapor tail. All the tails joined into a long snake like object. All ancient societies mentioned this event. Since the Bible agrees, it is a historical catastrophic event that really happened before the time of Job. The word God here is not the biblical God. It is Elowaha, which in this context evidently refers to what the pagans worshiped, a planet. The crushing of a planet in a great battle in the sky was the focus of stories in every ancient society.

Job 26:9-14 "He obscures the face of the full moon And spreads His cloud over it. (10) "He has inscribed a circle on the surface of the waters At the boundary of light and darkness. (11) "The pillars of heaven tremble And are amazed at His rebuke. (12) "He quieted the sea with His power, And by His understanding He shattered Rahab. (13) "By His breath the heavens are cleared; His hand has pierced the fleeing serpent. (14) “Behold, these are the fringes of His ways; And how faint a word we hear of Him! But His mighty thunder, who can understand?”

Isaiah 51:9 Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not You who cut Rahab in pieces, Who pierced the dragon?

Psalms 89:10-12 You Yourself crushed Rahab like one who is slain; You scattered Your enemies with Your mighty arm. (11) The heavens are Yours, the earth also is Yours; The world and all it contains, You have founded them. (12) The north and the south, You have created them; Tabor and Hermon shout for joy at Your name.

Notice that the Bible is not using pagan symbols. It is agreeing with the pagans that a great watery planet was crushed. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of crushed planet pieces orbit between Mars and Jupiter. The rocks on these irregular shaped objects have in some cased volcanic attributes. In other cases, they have the signature of rocks that formed in warm liquid water.

Western people struggle in certain areas of the Bible, because we hold science as the standard of truth. Science began when the pagan Greeks tried to overthrow the ancient system of change and supplant it with ideas about changelessness. However, the basic premise of all scientists did not develop until the disciples of Friar Thomas d’Aquino. It was from his writing that science got its metaphysic: that the essence of substance is changeless. Most scientific measuring units and the laws of physics presume Friar Thomas’ metaphysics.

Adjusting the Bible to fit our own worldview can change its meaning. It is important to use the worldview of the ancients and their grammar. For example, an ancient person would not interpret the Bible with notions of time. The Bible mentions many timing events (days, years etc) but it never mentions time per se. When we interpret it with our Western notions of time we can alter the meaning from how a contemporary would understand it.

Victor

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And how did they know of this planet being destroyed? Wait, don’t tell me:

image

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They had eyes to see with. They described with graphic stories the crushing of this planet. They also described how a planet skimmed over the surface of the Earth. For example, the Greeks also recorded how the Sun moved north and south (the precession of the Earth axis) during a close planet event. Indeed, their descriptions are very similar to the descriptions in Joshua, although some of them are much older. They also mentions what we would call tidal tsunamis, when the sea surged over the lowlands during these close passages. In the book of Judges, the planets fought from their courses as the valley of the river Kishon was flooded and destroyed the chariots of the Canaanites.

Trying to understand the universe with theories of linear time / fixed orbits violates the visible history of the galaxies. IN hundreds of billions of examples, at many ranges, streams of stars steadily accelerate outward, often growing into local growth spirals, like the Milky Way. The atomic clocks accelerate along with the accelerating, increasing in volume star steams.

Change and science are opposite worldviews.

Victor

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Somebody needs to bring back Gustav Holst…

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PSA to all: Before responding to Victor, if you weren’t hanging around here in August 2016, you may want to peruse this enlightening thread.

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What’s a ‘changing earth creationist?’

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Can you show me the sources of these claims?

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It’s an origins debate category with precisely one adherent.

There’s a reason for that. :wink:

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Are you seriously suggesting a planet collided with the earth a few thousand years ago, and there are no traces of it left?

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Is he a Poe?

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Please note that the Bible does not state that a planet collided with Earth. It only mentions a planet crushing, which all early societies also recorded. It uses similar imagery as the Canaanites, Greeks and Babylonians - a sea serpent. Indeed, if a watery planet was crushed, each major block of planet would sport a vapor tail. Perhaps this looked like a multi-headed sea serpent to the ancient stargazers.

The Bible does mention a long day in Joshua and the planets fighting from their courses in Judges. The Greeks ascribed these same effects to close passages with Venus. Indeed, Venus is the only planet to rotates backwards. At each conjunction, it points the same longitude at us. Its day is longer than its year in order to preserve this remarkable resonance.

A Changing Earth Creationist is someone who attempts to understand biblical creation and biblical earth history using the ancient concept of change. Change and science are diametrically opposite worldviews.

In the changing worldview, everything continues to change, which is why the golden generations deteriorated to iron. Thus, Job describes the vast geological changes (such as the ocean drying) that corresponded to a lifetime during the dinosaur era. (See Job 14). He mentions how their faces intensely kept changing until they died. Indeed, if you lived to watch the Nile river wear down a channel deep that the Grand canyon, and then fill it up with sediments, you would grow thick Neanderthal brows from vast age.

By the way, the changing worldview is supported by the only history that is visible as it happened, cosmic history. Trillions of star globs emerged from tiny cores in billions of galaxies, These spread out, accelerated out, rotated out, often growing into local growth spirals. (In the biblical account, Elohim continues to speak to the sky luminaries for them to become raqiya (noun spreading things). Indeed, the visible properties of all matter keep changing as billions of galaxies spread out into spreading things, just like the Creator ordered. The atomic clocks and the orbits accelerate together as matter’s volume also increases.

(Ever wonder why the Bible says the Earth continues to spread out. Indeed, the continents fit together on a minuscule globe, without any of the modern deep oceans). Change and science (time) are opposite worldview.

Victor

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In all seriousness, stories of sea serpents most likely originated from distorted accounts of moray eels and/or oarfish. The sea became a symbol of chaos because humans cannot live there. Therefore chaos became personified as a sea serpent, being the most obvious example of a monstrous sea creature. It needn’t be any more complex than this.

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You keep saying this. How does science not accommodate change? It seems to me that science (which is not a “worldview,” as has been pointed out) assumes change…

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Heads up. Victor has his own definition of “change” and it is not what you might think.

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Science is an orderly way of understanding the world using elementary principles. Those elementary principles form the basis for a worldview upon which science was historically built.

  1. In the Old Testament era, the elementary principle was “everything changes.” The Apostle Paul: the universe is presently enslaved to fundamental change (phthora). Plato used phthora for how everything changes since the beginning “genesis ka phthora”. Paul used two orderly submission and two together verbs to describe this universal deterioration of all things (Romans 8:19-22). Creation scientists often interpret these verses with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The domain of this law is not universal, since all atoms are excluded. Scientists presume that they do not continually change themselves. Indeed, most of their measuring definitions depend on this assumption.

a. The ancient worldview fit their languages and earth histories. Ancient languages had no words for time, only timing EVENTS, such as new moons and days. They had no verb TENSES, since a system of change does not need notions of time. Their clocks and calendars were dynamic, adjusted to fit nature’s changes. Their earth histories were also about change, how new oceans spread out, how the Earth keeps growing, how the planet orbits kept changing. They always looked back on the patriarchs as those who lived to watch geological changes (see Job 14).

  1. The Greek philosophers tried to overthrow the ancient worldview, to build a philosophical science. At first they continued to admit that everything changes. Then Parmenides showed that, if everything is really changing, they could never invent science. Thus, the latter philosophers tried to find changelessness, such as Aristotle’s hypokeimenon. However, Greek was also an aspectual language. The present shows a state of continuing action. Thus the Greeks could not imagine that what substance IS, IS fixed and changeless. However, in their efforts at finding mathematical planet orbits, they imagined that a day could be sliced up into tiny bits of “time”.

a. The medieval Christians integrated philosophy into their religion. Thus, Augustine imagined that God created time, is not in time and sees the future. Time became a central doctrine of the Catholic church. They even translated the Latin eternal for the Greek biblical ages (aionias).

b. Then the Dominican, Friar Thomas, moved the church away from Plato and towards Aristotle. Since God said to Moses, I AM, therefore he is the changeless self existent One: “ipsum esse per se subsistens”. If God is absolutely changeless, then what he made could also have a changeless being. His writings led his disciples to use the Latin noun of the verb to be (esse) essentia for substances. Thus, the essence of substance is changeless became the Western metaphysic.

c. In Friar Thomas’ metaphysics, substances can change accidentally, change state, combine etc, but what they ARE, their essence, cannot change unless they cease to be. This notion that matter is not changing itself became the basis for most physics operational measuring definitions (mass, time, energy gravity) and mathematical methods. Almost everything a scientists does and thinks is based on the Western worldview.

d. Scientists invent incredible myths, to protect their worldview, which they never question. Thus the scientific universe is 99% undetectable with any instrument. All the magic was contrived to protect their worldview, which is the elementary basis for their empiricism and mathematics.

Efforts to interpret the Bible with the Western worldview also produces ad hoc stories. Only the literal Creation account, interpreted in their aspectual language, fits the visible history of how the galaxies formed. God continues to command the sky luminaries to become spreading things (noun raqiya). The spreading things are to shine on the Earth and serve as markers for days and years, not philosophical notions of time.

Indeed, we can see with telescopes, at many ranges, the history of how the galaxies formed.

a. In billions of galaxies, at many ranges, orbits spread out as trillions of star streams emerged for the unformed core matter God created first. The atomic clocks keeps shifting as the orbits keep accelerating outward. Countless galaxies become spreading things raqiya, exactly as God continues to command them. What is visible fits the ancient worldview, but not the modern one. It only fits the biblical creation texts, not science.

Victor

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I think most (all?) scientists would disagree with you that observations do not “fit” science.

A couple of other observations. I’m pretty sure Paul (and possible Plato) did not use phthora the way you say they did.

Further, Paul wrote in Greek and made good use of the two options in Greek for “time.” Still further, embedded within the Hebrew worldview was the sense of “this age” and “the age to come”–distinguished in one significant sense by “now” and “the future.” They were also aware that the difference between “now” and “the future” was a difference in time.

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Don’t waste your time. It’s time you will never get back.

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