I wasn’t talking about historicity, I was talking about what the text says. Their use of “the land” at most meant the one landmass in the middle of the universal sea bordered by the metal-hard dome of heaven.
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Im not arguing for atheism vs TEism…that was not my point at all.
might seem off topic, however, i do not think that St Roymonds general claim that one must understand lanuage in order to appropriately interprete scripture is valid. A couple of reasons why:
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New Testament writers also support the Old Testament accounts (as written) of the flood and 7 day creation.
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It ignores every example in the bible where God revealed Himself and His will through visions!
The claim that God could not explain with words is ignorant of visions where God most definately did reveal many things.
I suppose i would be reasonably safe in saying the most famous visions of Gods explanations are those found in the books of Daniel and Revelation (which are the ending of what began in Genesis that was corrupted by sin)
As a result of the above, i find some of these weird theological statements St Roymond appears to believe to be extremely problematic.
That rests on assumptions not found in the text.
No it doesn’t. When there’s a vision involved, the text tells us. You don’t get to make up visions to force your worldview onto the text.
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Mr Burrawang. There are two methods of explaining our experience on earth: science and faith. Science succeeds and faith fails. If you could temporarily park your faith and look at science only, I think you’d be quite challenged and hopefully in an enlightening way. You’d understand how the Scientific Method underpins all knowledge. Science flies us to the moon.
Reliance only on faith condemns people to a fruitless quest of proving biblical assertions using science, like YEC geologist Snelling does. It doesn’t work. You either believe in science or you deny science.
When your snowblower doesn’t start, you first check for fuel and spark. Doing so is pure Scientific Method.
Or you could pray. Religion flies us into buildings.
Praise the Lord and pass the amuniition!
Comes for the Great War
Religion is a supplement or aid to practicality rather than an alternative.
Richard
If you have the time to deeply insult me and every one of my colleagues who work on evolution, which you’ve done in this thread, you’d better make time to back up your charges.
So you don’t have time to address they evidence you’ve been shown (evidence that you asked for), but you do have time to type all of that out, even though it has nothing to do with what you’re responding to.
Why do you keep talking about the similarities between species? What do they have to do with the evidence in question?
Fine – say that.
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It’s playground talk. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to view young earthists as the adult version of the kids in the school playground who would deliberately provoke you to try and get a reaction out of you.
The difference, of course, is that children don’t have the option of leaving toxic environments such as that, but adults do. If young earthists are genuinely concerned about people leaving the Church, they need to give some serious consideration to the possibility that they themselves are the cause of the problem and not the cure.
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That may be true for some, but I think something else is going on a lot of the time. I think it’s very easy for people to view groups that they’re defining themselves against – the outsiders, the bad guys – as abstractions rather than as real people. Just a shadowy mass of sinister figures. Occasionally, I try to get someone to see that they’re casually defaming people they don’t know based on hearsay. I can’t say that I’ve had much success in this effort.
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True. I threw in the historicity part just to argue with John Walton, who’s not part of the convo. haha. My point was simply the author(s) used the only word available, which unfortunately has the semantic range to include everything from the known world to the local area. Judging from the universal language in the surrounding context, I think the text indicates more than a regional flood was in view. Your mileage may vary.
Exactly right. That’s the same thing I was trying to do above. I long ago accepted that evidence and reasoning won’t change YEC minds, but the casual way they defame those on the “outside” of their fundamentalist circle – whether scientists or fellow Christians (or both) – still discourages me.
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When you invoke “bible doctrine,” which I understand as “YEC doctrine,” as giving you hope for an afterlife, and contrast that with atheism, which offers no hope of an afterlife, my first thought is, “Whoa. That leaves out a whole lot in between.” Tell me where I misunderstood you.
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Exactly right also. Southern Baptists are by far the largest evangelical denomination, and they lost 500,000 members in 2022. Evangelicals used to crow about the fact that mainline denominations were in decline while their numbers were up. Guess what? The SBC is back where it was before the “Reagan Revolution” and “Moral Majority” launched the culture war. Is there a word for the opposite of evangelism?
Okay, y’all are distracting me from making it through these videos.
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When they can’t be made to see that they’re defaming people they’re directly interacting with it’s futile to think they’ll care about defaming people they have never encountered.
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It can even be used to mean soil!
You mean the repetitive “all”? That got used back then the same we we use it today, when we say things like, “the whole world was amazed” when in reality most people didn’t even know about a phenomenon and of those who did most didn’t even care. We see it in the New Testament with statements such as, “all Judea were going out to him”. So when it says “all the earth” or even “all the high mountains” it doesn’t automatically have to be taken literally.
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Devangelism?
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Yeah. I hesitated to bring that up because there are other words for dirt, such as the play on words between adam and adamah. Correct me if I’m wrong, but are there any Hebrew words other than eretz for indicating the known world (or the totality of “land” surrounded by the seas underneath the dome)?
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Dysangelism?
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Yes, the repetitive “all,” but the flood in Gen 6-9 is the climax of an overall narrative that starts in Gen. 2-3, continues in Gen 4 and culminates with “the earth” being “full of violence.” This doesn’t strike me as hyperbole like “all Judea” going to see Jesus. The narrative flows from A&E being expelled, Cain murdering Abel, and violence (sin) continuing to propagate until God intervenes. The corresponding ANE mythology says the gods brought about the flood because humanity was making too much commotion for them to rest. I prefer the explanation in Genesis, but I’m not under any illusions that it’s literally true. I take it as polemic, but polemic inspired by God.
There’s תֵּבֵל (tey-vel), used in phrases such as “the foundations of the world” and “Hw will judge the world in righteousness”. It’s most frequently used of the fertile world, i.e. everywhere that things are alive, but can be equivalent to “eretz”, but it is usually inclusive, meaning everywhere that the is land. Interestingly, it appears in the Psalms more than anywhere else.
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Disestablishmentarianism? Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Y’all are killin me. haha