Why Do Atheists Always Go After Ken Ham?

The bible NEVER says that GOD created the UNIVERSE or EARTH is 6 days. It talks about the creation of LIFE on earth in 6 days. But in the beginning GOD created the HEAVENS AND THE EARTH. Then the first day GOD created light. How many years did it take God to create the HEAVENS and THE EARTH is unknown. Dont fall for the confusion, and dont debate atheists over the internet. Debate ones who are professors and doctors and etc… Many atheists over the internet, specially on fb, just simply claim they know everything… A wise man knows that he does not know all, but a fool knows everything. 

Quibble:  That 46% statistic includes more than just Young Earth Creationists. It also includes Old Earth Creationists, people who believe that all life except humans evolved, etc.

I don’t know what subset of the 46% is YEC, but it is a smaller set (hopefully much smaller).

Great. Now tell that to Ken Ham, who insists that you’re wrong.

I just wrote about this today myself. I don’t think that Clark is arguing that we need to stop arguing against Ham, but there’s no point in supporting Ham in order to argue against Clark. Yes, the Bible makes that claim, but it makes a lot of contradictory claims, and if we’re discussing the existence of god or the viability of the Bible as a moral text with somebody, there’s no point in arguing against things they’re not saying. Telling somebody what they believe in order to make points is nothing but strawmanning the argument, and we don’t need to do that. If somebody doesn’t think the Bible makes a claim that the world was created in 6 24-hour periods between 6,000-10,000 years ago, then that’s great! We agree. They can now move on to trying to provide evidence of an invisible man in the sky who takes a rather creepy interest in my life.

What Clark is arguing, and I agree with, is that we don’t have to side with Creationists and support the “there is one, true Christianity and this extremely ignorant one is it” myth. It makes arguments with people like Clark or John Shore, people who can be allies to the atheist community, meaningless because we’re not addressing their points about the existence of a deity, we’re addressing other people’s points.

For the most part, the people who wrote the Bible didn’t know any better. Their philosophical views are arguable; their views of nature are not.

Seminary trickery. That would be setting up your own imaginary conversation so that your straw opponents’ statements actually are false.

Nowhere does the Bible clearly state that the Creation occurred 6000 years ago. A certain Bishop Ussher carefully counted some begats in his Bible and pulled a significant number of guesses out of  a dark place to come up with his 4004 BC date. It is an extra-Biblical bit of dubious calculation.

Looks like Ken Ham was right to  warn of seminarians’ trickery, not that Fred Clark has given us any reason to take his word that Ken actually did say so.

Clarks’ real aim here is too distance himself from the likes os Ken Ham, and fine. But the problem is when I (and many Atheist I know) cite a literal interpretation of the bible we are not just criticizing those that literally interoperate it that way like Ham and YEC, I am also saying Clark and people who follow a metaphor based interpretation are also just spewing bullshit since they are really just making up what is and is not a metaphor to suit their own goals.

So when I say things like “the bible literally says this…” I am not just  criticizing those that think it literally says that, I’m also criticizing those that do all the mental gymnastics to claim it doesn’t say that, just so they can keep believing any of it is true.

I view the genesis bit as only one obvious and glaring example of a much larger problem with scripture. The man problem is people that believe that anything written down about the supernatural is true. In my mind it doesn’t really matter if the writing is about supernatural stories about the origin of matter, arrival of life on Earth, virgin births, resurrections, or divine plans for afterlives.  All scripture is just stuff written down by people who were only inspired by prevailing religious beliefs. None of it was actually inspired by angels or deities floating around. Refuting Ken Ham is just low-hanging fruit because it is so easy.  All the supernatural stuff in scripture, though, can be discounted as human projection and wishful thinking.

Sometimes the liberal, progressive Christians are just more cleaver in wrapping the subset of supernatural scripture they still cling to in a lot of flowery language and rationalizations. The Ken Hams of the world are more stark when they take a literal stance and are much easier targets for internet atheists who don’t want to get into nuance.

I think part of the point of atheist being ‘pro literalist’ is that if you believe that the Bible is  collection of stories that aren’t true then there’s no reason left to believe in any of it’s claims. Which as a rule, atheists don’t.

The problem for a ‘reasonable christian’ who thinks that the bible is not to be trusted is to explain why they’re still clinging to whichever non-evidence based beliefs they still hold. Ken Ham doesn’t have that problem.

You used all caps; you must be correct. I’ll listen to you.

It’s pretty much all crap. And there’s nothing wrong with a Christian recognizing that and disregarding the stuff that’s obviously factually wrong. That doesn’t make them less of a Christian, it just shows they’re not totally irrational.

If Clark believes the bible is just a collection of stories that are not true, then how the bloody hell does he thinks he still gets to call himself “christian”? Where does his “christianity” come from then if not the bible? Unless he claims to have proof of christianity from outside the bible, he’s just trying to have his cake and not eat it too. 

If I agreed with everyone that Lord of the RIngs is just a collection untrue stories I don’t get to go around telling everyone Middle Earth is still real without looking stupid.

While I would tend to agree more with a progressive Christian such as the author on day-to-day matters, I have to continue to believe that “literalism” is actually the more “honest” position (even though demonstrably wrong.) In that case, I sort of agree with Ken Ham.

If you don’t take the bible literally, then the genealogy of Jesus (either of the contradictory ones) is either partially wrong or wholly made up. If the “gospels” contain fabrications and/or inaccuracies, then why believe the other parts of it that tell is that we need Jesus, or that he is the son of God?

With biological evolution, death has been part of the world since before humans. This too refutes the “fall” and disputes thee need for a messiah; without original sin, of what need is there of a savior?

 “Big game”? So there is a group of christians who believe SOME parts of the bible and ignore the rest… and that’s a “challenging target”? I’ve been asking them for some time now how do they distinguish the parts that are literally true from all other parts that are just “alegorical”. No answer so far. I also ask them what the “alegory” is supposed to mean. No answer either.

 Which leads immediately to the charges against liberal Christians: cherry-picking, which is different from the charges against more thorough literalists like Ham. Fred Clark is playing with a straw man.

 We just need to get River Tam working on this and we’re golden.

 A good point; there is no credible source for Christianity outside Teh Bible. So it seems more likely that Clark cherry-picks which parts of teh Bible to take seriously, rather than that he thinks the whole thing is unreliable.

Being an atheist based primarily on philosophical issues, I can partly understand where Fred Clark is coming from.  However, especially in the U.S., where a certain strand of Christianity is grabbing for political power, and has a direct effect on U.S. politics and culture, where roughly half of U.S. Americans believe in creationism, the primary target of atheists today in the U.S. SHOULD be those Christians of a funamentalist variety. 

Why bother with a smaller, less vocal (and less dangerous) set of Christians who espouse the theology of Tillich, Bultmann or Spong?  Yes, fundamentalism may be “low-lying fruit”–but there is much more of it around and it is having a much more direct, adverse effect on society.     

I have to take things issue by issue. I don’t believe in gods or a deity – that’s why I’m an atheist.

Creationism is laughable, or at least it would be if it wasn’t constantly fighting to inject itself into the education system and distract from real science.

As for super liberal Christians: if we agree on an issue, that’s great. Let’s shake on that. But let’s not ignore that fact that instead of disavowing non-sense, you back peddle and latch the remains of a shattered god figure. You use the same book as the Creationists – giving them extra legitimacy where they should find none given what we actually know at this point about the age of the universe, our galaxy, our solar system and planet.

I’m not a Christian, I’m an atheist. But here’s my understanding.

There are a very wide range of beliefs about the Bible amongst Christians. And I think that what you’ve given here is just too simplistic given that diversity.

The most liberal or sophisticated Christian theologies assert that none of the Bible was written by God. That means that whether the authors meant the text is to be taken as true, allegorical, metaphorical, Midrashic, or whatever, it’s not innerant (i.e. free of factual errors.) Under those theologies, it’s a human production and comes with all of the errors of any other human text. It has religious importance only because it represents the ideological ancestors of modern believers expressing their understanding of the Divine and of their faith. However, those understandings were suited for their time and need to be updated to fit ours. This means that the Bible is a book expressing religious claims, but is not the arbiter of Truth that Fundamentalists would take it to be.

Usually, these same theologies are absolutely fine with the modern textual analyses of Biblical texts, most importantly Higher Criticism (the Documentary Hypothesis and the like. One should note that several members of the Jesus Seminar are liberal theologians. John Shelby Spong comes to mind as an example.)

It may interest you to know that there are passages which all Christians, whether conservative or liberal, believe to be metaphorical. For example, in Matthew 5:13, when Jesus calls people the “salt of the Earth”, he doesn’t mean to say that people are made of salt. It’s another discussion as to the interpretation of what is meant there, but it’s very clear from context that this is a metaphor. Even Biblical Literalists don’t take that passage literally (“Biblical Literalism” is really a misnomer; the real doctrine is Biblical *Inerrancy* — i.e. the idea that the Biblical text was written by God and is therefore free from error and that parts which make sense when taken literally should be.)It’s also important to point out that, for most of history, most theologians have taken large portions of the Biblical text to be non-literal. It’s actually only relatively recently in history, and particularly in the United States, where that trend changed. This has a lot to do with the so-called Modernist/Fundamentalist schizm in the 19th century. The positions of Aquinas and Maimonides provide an interesting contrast to those Fundamentalists. And even the early Fundamentalists didn’t take Genesis absolutely literally; the Scofield Reference Bible (the go-to reference for Fundies in the early decades of the 20th century) provides a Day-Age view, *not* the modern 6-days-of-Creation view.

 I’m not so sure. I would say that one would want to interpret the Bible as one’s deity intended.

On the other hand, I’m an atheist. And I don’t think we should adjudicate what the proper ways to be Christian are; let the believers tell us what they believe, and let us attack what they claim to hold to be true.

None of them are right. But that’s not the point. The point is that we don’t try to tell which is ignorant and which is a Real True Christian, we deal with each based on what they actually believe, not what we want them to believe. Saying that Clark has to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible in order to be a Christian basically ignores the actual claims he’s making. You and I don’t get to tell people what their faith means any more than people get to tell atheists that we’re all miserable nihilists.

Rather than trying to argue against a monolithic idea of a faith, we should actually address the actual arguments made by actual people. Clark clearly understands that evolution is true. He doesn’t put Biblical understanding above scientific knowledge. When he doesn’t understand something about the world, he goes to a scientist, not a minister. Claiming that this is either not the case or that that means he can’t be a real Christian is a disingenuous argument. It’s a strawman, and there’s plenty of actual things that he’s wrong about to argue with him that we don’t need to apply other wrong beliefs in order to make a point.

The Mythical Moderates, use the same books

Resurrection and salvation is no more plausible than the Garden of Eden or Noah’s Ark, so basically, what are atheists after? The literal biblicist believes only a little more nonsense than the liberal one, and the liberal wants the atheist to lay off the literal interpretations. It really depends who you’re arguing with, but a liberal Christian will bend more to accommodate the bible with reality. They may be easier to get along with because they’re not so crazy, but they make less sense. What value has the bible got at all to someone if they can make up shit as they go along? Liberal theists are inventing a new religion, what I’ve always said. They are denying the bible is completely true and excusing themselves from the extreme fundamentalist/creationist while they make up something that concurs with modern thinking and modern interpretations, and this also needs to be pointed out.

It’s easy to discredit Adam and Eve and Noah scientifically, and so they do, but when they want points for it, they can’t get them. It’s easy to make up a new religion of what to believe because obviously some stuff just isn’t true. Then what have you got? Explain how you sort your beliefs into myths and truths, please. You have just as much explaining, if not more, than Ken Ham. Isn’t resurrection just as silly to believe in, for a grown-up?

I find it funny that he clearly realises that he is a different type of christian than Ken Ham but then groups all internet atheist like we all thought the same and did the same.

Your comment makes absolutely no sense what so ever.  I can tell that you are younger than 50 because you represent the “education” profession once it stopped teaching logic in public schools…as your illogical train-wreck thought process demonstrates.

I don’t much like Bill Maher, but to suggest he makes Ken ham seem like Isaac Newton? I’m sorry, Bill Maher, for all his faults, is far more scientifically literate than Ken Ham.

Oh, and if you can pick a specific, demonstrable falsehood that Bill Maher advocates and demonstrate that 46% of Americans believe it, then you might have a point. The most glaring scientific falsehood Bill Maher has advocated is alternative medicine and anti-vaccination propaganda. Find me evidence of any significant number of atheists quoting and cheering him on that. I’ll wait. OK, find ONE. Keep looking.

I guess one of the parts of the Bible that you would consider “crap” would be the part from Genesis 1.27:  “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ”
This simply means that all people on earth came from one couple, Adam & Eve.
Including the times of Moses until today, the Hebrew Scriptures have claimed this for about 3500 years and now, the Human Genome Project has recently announced that indeed, humankind did come from one set of parents.
Next “crap” you would like to discuss? How about the proliferation of racism that “evolved” from Darwinian theory that states whites are the highest form of human with “Negroids”as subhumans (see U.S. biology textbooks from the 1900’s).
Next??

I admit I’m a die-hard Maher lover.  Watch his show every Friday it’s on, have seen him live and of course own Religulous.

His stance on vaccinations makes me SICK and I gripe about it every time he brings it up.  

And lo, there is a beam in your own eye. Maybe you should tell people to get off your lawn. That would come across as more rational and less pseudo-intellectual.

Not much else need be said about a guy who claims that the U.S. had  a 99% literacy rate, let alone that said imaginary number was because of religion.

You know who actually DID have a 99% literacy rate? The Soviets. Go figure.

The Human Genome Project states no such thing. Citation please? Preferably one not from AiG, Disco Institute or ICR. 

What science actually says is that the common female ancestor of all humans lived in Africa about 140K years ago, and our common male ancestor lived about 60K years ago.  So no, all people on Earth today did not come from one couple. They actually lived about 80,000 years apart. 

Now doesn’t that blow your religiously trolling noodle?

Why is there so much straw around here?

Oh because Matt is busy making straw men. When you are done making all of them let us know so we can set them on fire.

lol “Textbooks from the 1900’s” did those text books talk about those things before or after talking about the either? Oh and canals on Mars?

 If the garden of Eden/talking snake story is an allegory, then:

1) Is Jesus’ death and resurrection also allegory?
or
2) Did Jesus H. Christ, God and son of God, die for an allegory?

What criteria are applied to decide which parts are allegory and which are for realsies? You’re just not going to get around the cherry-picking charge.

The Human Genome Project has recently announced that indeed, humankind did come from one set of parents”
.
No it didn’t. This is why scientists should not use religious language and imagery, like “mitochondrial Eve.” Some idiot like Matt Dixon will come along and take it literally.

 Ummm… I’m assuming you are talking about mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. They do not at all support the idea that humankind came from one set of parents. They were not contemporaries and there were many other women and men that were contemporary.

Here is some more info regarding the common misconceptions about Mitochondrial Eve:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_eve#Common_fallacies

I agree. If church goers spent a hour with other church goers from a hundred years ago (or choose your amount of decades) they might not recognize half of what the other group was talking about. It could even be the same flavour of denomination.

This reinventing – I think it’s a group effort. Popular culture and media, including TV and films all play their part. We want a nicer, kinder God. Some of better sounding comic book explanations (excuses) seem to stick are repeated. 

Even my notion of what “GOD” is will be different from people in the past and people in the future, even if we all agree that what we’re talking about is a fictional character. This is of course normal – my concept of Batman isn’t the same as 60’s Batman.  

 They’re not more clever, really. They’re more vague is all.

 But the entire basis of claiming that Jesus was a person and divine and that there is a god is the Bible. It isn’t disingenuous to point that out. If someone claimed that all evidence for evolution was false but that the theory was true anyway, they’d be lucky to get away without their eardrums bursting from the criticism that they’d receive.

 No, Clark doesn’t clearly understand that evolution is true.  He says he does. That’s the problem.

He charges Ham with using bad science yet does does the same thing.  Sure, Ham’s understanding (or use) of science is worse but you can’t exactly be a Christian without putting your religion above science.  Once you apply science to Christianity, there isn’t much left.

I’ve always heard an excuse for that still requiring Jesus to show up, and even if Jesus was also mythological, it’s not thought all the way through. I mean, if it’s a beautiful story to someone, you know, like…. I like Charlotte’s Web, for example. It’s a beautiful story to me, parts of it, not even all of it. I don’t magically believe Charlotte wrote actual English words in her web to save Wilbur; I don’t even believe a spider could make friends with a pig, and it’s just a cute story that, you know, you could learn from, how to be friends, how to be brave, how to stick up for someone else, etc., but here is where I lose track of the liberal Christian – which parts are they defending because they tell a beautiful story and how does it affect their life? Even I think the Jesus story could be nice – it’s nice to know messing up isn’t the end for you, you can still forgive yourself and go ahead in life. Just like any story.

How does any of it become true or necessary though? Without Charlotte’s Web obviously, all those concepts are still accessible. You don’t need the story to tell you and you don’t need magic to feel something psychologically helpful. Problem is, people do burden themselves with guilt they don’t deserve, and they believe that is something that requires magic to make go away. Then they saddle a couple other beliefs on top that are just part of the package, and may be actively harmful. Religious people, all of them, believe a fairy tale; there is something too harsh about life to overcome, or that’s how it’s sold to them. You are guilty and the feeling, the allegorical description, is ancient born in the species. To get over it, we give you an invisible friend who died just so you can cut this shit out because it’s making you unproductive. I mean, I believe the story of Adam and Eve as describes a perfection that we all could have had, it describes a world that someone fucked up and we have to live with their mistake. It describes why life sucks, basically, why it’s hard, why we get sick, why we have pain, why we lose, why we never get where we want to be. It used to be awesome but we fucked up. Is that true, was it perfect, did we fuck it up? No.

So how does Jesus figure in to save us – oh yeah, there’s this new club uptown, just opened. It’s just like how the world was supposed to be before someone fucked it up. It’s got some roundabout kind of rules. First, this guy actually died… what? OH GOD NO!!! No, it’s cool, it was actually god. And because he loves you, he died so you can get in this club.

Now, I find that a ridiculous workaround, but apparently some people are really moved by that!

MZT: laugh at this: the Bible has stated for over 3500 years of Hebrew history that God created mankind from two people: Adam and Eve.  Recently, the Human Genome Project conducted the highest scientific mapping of the human chromosomes and found that…mankind indeed derived from two people.

If you would do a little research you would discover that the education system in the USA had an illiteracy rate of under .1% when run by the churches. Now after trillions of dollars and over 100 years of secular operated education, America has over 40 million illiterates and another 50 million who are functionally illiterate, nearing the rate of Zambia (that’s in Africa).

Reason this one: the ancient Text called the Bible says that God created all things out of nothing while evolutionist say all the matter in the universe just so happened to collect in one spot, compress to the size of a golf ball and then…it just blew up!!!! Now which is the most laughable? Where did all that matter come from?

Oh, here’s a gut ripper: all the water on the earth came from meteors and comets that crashed through the atmosphere! Let’s say each meteor/comet had 1000 gallons and weighed 10 tons…how many did it take to cover the earth with water…wouldn’t all of that weight have spun the earth farther out into space?  How did they all get past the great space vacuum cleaner, Jupiter?

Man, this is just too funny…and serious scientist s say this stuff on t.v.!

The creation account is factually wrong. A rational person can’t believe it because it is contradicted by evidence. The resurrection is not contradicted by evidence, so while it’s a pretty crazy thing to believe, it’s in an altogether different class than the first.

I have potatos in my garden that aren’t dumb enough to make Ken Ham look like Newton.

The Jesus resurrection story is just a claim by men. It should strike any reasonable person as extremely unlikely to be true, but there’s no evidence either for or against it. That’s quite different from the Garden of Eden story, which is simply wrong, based on powerful evidence that contradicts it.

In fact, however, I don’t see why a Christian even needs to take the resurrection story as literal- although I’m sure that virtually all do.

 His teachings are backed up by prevailing bullshit-peddlers calling themselves scientists. Just because they could disagree with science until the cows came home does not make them credible. And sure, by association, you’re kind of a moron! Go, you!

 You cannot prove people’s lives have been made better BY Jesus Christ. People who believe in Jesus Christ taught these others to believe in Jesus Christ and some other way, like feeding them and giving them medicine, changed their lives. You cannot prove Jesus Christ is real this way. I can feed someone and give them medicine. I would not waste time to teach them there is no Jesus Christ the way that you waste time teaching them that there is. So you’ve found people to be gullible, does not prove Jesus is a real power in their life or improvements therein. Try again.

wait what 46%? Seriously?
I mean I knew people believed that but almost half of the U,S? 
I guess my experience of this is skewed because I live in NYC? I didn’t think this was THAT prevalent. I mean where the hell do they think the early hominid skeletons came from? 
I just…This is very depressing. I don’t even know anymore. 

Here’s some extra-biblical proof of Jesus Christ being alive and well and you and I can prove it!

How about this simple test: Next time I travel to Congo, you go with
me. I’ll hang out with the locals who are Christians and you hang out
with the locals who are atheists. Then, we’ll meet at the airport after
one week.

How about this test : One gay person can hang out with the Ugandan atheists, and another can hang out with Ugandan christians. We’ll see how that goes for them!

 You are too gullible.

I have an easy way to prove to you that Allah is the one true god, and Mohammed is his prophet. Next time I go to Iran, I will show you the multitudes of the poor that the mosques there feed. I’ll show you imams that have dedicated their lives to serving Allah, to better the human condition. The only possible explanation for them treating other human beings decently is their belief in Allah! Not empathy, or the golden rule – only Allah being the one true god could possibly explain that!

As atheists, you all know that the Bible is riddled with
inconsistencies. It’s therefore impossible to take the whole book
literally, no matter how hard you claim to – two contradictory things
can’t both be true. Since all theists cherrypick anyway, it would be
good to ally with the good ones, the ones who cherrypick the
passages about love and kindness. They could be friends and allies, if they aren’t pushed away.

 Uhhhhh, if your grandmother is a lesbian…where did you come from???? Did her lesbian lover have a congenital defect? Did she evolve into a man and then back into a woman?
Your comments comparing God’s teachings on His holiness misses that fact that in teaching these truths, God also said He “desires mercy and not sacrifice” and that He is “the Lord of the Sabbath.”

 Together, He teaches us that yes, the Sabbath is holy and set aside that man might rest and worship God, thanking Him for all He has done and all that He is and to forgo that deserves death BUT in His infinite mercy, He forgives us when we break His laws, giving us life instead. 

Even modern science has proven the validity of the “life-extending” truth of “resting” for a day,  that even applies to machinery, clothing and animals.

Your daughter’s comments reflect a teaching of Jesus in that He said children understand the Kingdom while we adults do not. See also the teaching on the “millstone.”

Uggh! I just got a headache from reading that inane bullshit.

Yes, it’s pretty shocking. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I never met anyone who denied evolution until college. And even then it was just one person. We’ve both been “blessed” geographically, for sure. I can’t even imagine what it must be like living in areas where this sort of thing is the norm.

Why would you consider people having a change of heart from being hateful to being loving as atrophy?

http://chzmemebase.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/internet-memes-explain-that.jpg

Holy christ on a flaming crutch! It is seriously like a child (a simple one at that) wrote that. Thanks for the good laughs though, although I don’t know whether I should be laughing or quaking in fear that there are people on this earth that actually think the way you do.

I understand that you disagree with Matt – but what he’s saying about comparing real people in places like the Congo holds water. I’ve had similar experiences. You can say that the believers are delusional, and that their peaceful, loving spirits are the result of trickery and brainwashing – but you cannot ignore the evidence that something powerful that actually changes peoples lives is at play. It’s an observable phenomeneon, not sure why you would say it’s laughable or childlike.

Holds no water. If you convince someone something is true still doesn’t prove that there is powerful change due to that imaginary thing. The belief in the imaginary thing can be powerful enough to the imagination of people at their most desperate, but that still doesn’t prove Jesus is real and a movement in their lives or improvements therein. Would you say, in the Disney cartoon, that it was actually the feather that made Dumbo fly or Dumbo’s belief in the feather that allowed him to use his goddamned ears? And as much as his ears could help him fly, when he dropped the feather, he stopped using his ears. Doesn’t mean the feather ever had any power in his flight, and if he had been taught to fly without it, he could always fly without it. Jesus isn’t real, you get it? Atheists could help people without adding Jesus and they’d be just as helped, but Christians believe it is Jesus and make it a point to convert people in need in order to get help from them. Neither the giver nor the receiver proves Jesus is real or helped them improve. 

That is not evidence. It is a lack of evidence, and that puts it in a very different category than something like Adam and Eve, a story which is contradicted by actual evidence.

I can’t demonstrate in a convincing way that somebody 2000 years ago didn’t rise from the dead, or appear to do so. There are no records. But I can demonstrate that there could not reasonably have been an Adam and Eve as the first humans.

Seriously? Resurrection to another plane of existence seems plausible enough to you that you can’t deny it?                             

What this guy said! ^^

I attended a panel discussion that included Hemant and a former “hardened skinhead” who had converted to Buddhism, abandoned his hate, and turned around his life.

Now, is that proof that the Eightfold Path is true and everyone can reach enlightenment if they try hard enough?

“Uhhhhh, if your grandmother is a lesbian…where did you come from???? Did her lesbian lover have a congenital defect? Did she evolve into a man and then back into a woman?”

WOW! Your logic is incredible! You have me stumped on that one, ALL CAPS DIXON. I mean who in their right mind has ever heard of a homosexual being married to someone of the opposite sex? Especially someone who grew up in those times? Something like that never happens. AMAZING!

 If you think that all of those things are central to Christianity, then you need to take them up with John Shelby Spong — a man who states that he is a Christian and rejects them. I don’t have a side in debating what kind of Christianity is the “proper” or “right” kind.

 I have a personal relationship with Athe! How dare you say such things about our religion!

 Goodness, DIXON, are you suffering from Alzheimer’s? I don’t know how many times now you’ve said the very same thing (about traveling to the Congo) almost word for word in this thread! It doesn’t matter how often you say it, it’s not proof of anything.

surely the point about the Bible (certainly the OT) is that its various authors believed they were indeed recording history. Modern liberal Xians are in fact reinterpreting the stories in light of what we now know scientifically, but Soapy Sam opposed Darwin in the 19th century precisely because Darwin’s theory disagreed with Biblical literalism. Modern liberal Xians are being disingenuous.

When George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, he didn’t really mean that there was once a real farm staffed by real talking animals.

 You mean, they weren’t afraid to say they didn’t have those answers instead of simply making shit up like religious people do when confronted with the same problem of knowing having an asswer?

Sadly, fundamentalism’s poison can stay around in the mind long after people lose their faith.

 Wait! Do you mean to tell me that the witch-burnings and the crusades(both internal and external) and the Inquisition and the slaughter of indigenous cultures in the Americas and the Protestant schisms and the wars that resulted and the raging anti-Semitism that led directly to the Holocaust in the 20th century were due to Christians looking at the Bible in a non-literal, non-fundamentalist way? Holy shit, Batman! What would’ve happened had they been looking at it in a fundamentalist way?

Oh, and for the record, I never said, literal. I said, sourced directly from God. Gods are wont to speak metaphorically.

Please, give me a fucking list of what in the Bile is allegory and what is not allegory.

One thing that characterises Christianity, arguably more so than any other religion, is change. Even before the Bible was finished, it changed from a weird Jewish sect to something more suited for the world of Greek philosophy.

Everywhere that Christianity has gone, it adapted and adopted that which was good and useful from the local culture. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you where pretty much all of the Christian festivals came from, right?

Change isn’t dishonest. On the contrary, it’s brutally honest. Religions have to change or die. Evolution is how we survive when the fitness landscape changes. This has always been the case, and I don’t see why things should be different now.

 Wasn’t Mayberry a religious Christian community of its time and place? Woulddn’t that make the episode kind of hypocritical?

 The trouble with this is that there are 50,000 Christian sects and denominations. Each one happily claims the others all wrong and, should the prevailing society allow it, happily go on wars of extermination against the heretics.  Each one of those sophisticated theologies belongs to only one of these sects and denominations and is not recognized by the others. You can’t really fight a monster like that, 1 head at a time. You have to fight the entire beast simultaneously.

I am a fairly fresh face to atheism.  As you can collect from the name I post under I am, however, not new to Ken Ham and his odd-ball ideas of creation.  I grew up in a town going to a church about 40 miles from the well known “Creation Museum” I went there as a kid(I’d say about 9) before it was completed.  My parents, my community donated money to make it the monster it is today.  In fact I live in the town directly north of where they plan to construct the Ark Experience or whatever the hell its going by now.

I have for a majority of my life, even when I was a pretty firm believer in the existence of a god, been against what they stood for and what they teach.  As a christian and going to a bible college in Tennessee I got quite a bit of negative feedback when I told people I did not agree with what Answers in Genesis was doing.  But it wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t believe in what they believed in.  I did have a different opinion of what creation meant though.  I believed in old world creation: billions of years, single cells evolving into flora and fauna, and the completely fucked up view that god intervened in natural selection to produce human beings.

My beef with Answers was this, you have a belief system based on faith.  Faith is agreeable among Christians(and likewise), to believe in something that can’t possibly be true.  Knowing there is no possible way for the creation “theory” to be true but being completely convinced by yourself it is true is what faith is all about.  But having faith was not enough for these people.  They feel that a god will not be pleased unless they go against him in professing that it is undoubtedly true and based on scientific evidence.  Which obviously cannot happen because there is no scientific evidence.  So not only is it that they have a very literal and closed minded view of “God’s word” they are faithless and lie.   But try telling that to a bunch of 20-something sheltered home conservatives at a bible college.

I posted a comment on Fred Clark’s blog about this. I basically said that I (as an atheist) don’t regard the Bible as Truth(TM), so the various metaphorical/allegorical interpretations of the text are all equally silly to me. Like any other work of fiction, I read what’s in the text literally, and I’m critical of the actual literal text of the Bible because so many people in this country actually think it’s the Truth(TM). I may not have worded it as clearly in my comment on Fred Clark’s blog as I did here, but that’s the gist of what I meant.

Back in 2002, the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a five-response question in an Ohio-specific poll, that differentiated Young Earth, Old-Earth, Intelligent Design, Theistic Evolution, and Atheistic Evolution. Ohio is a relatively median state on a number of metrics (income, education, religiosity, political leaning), and can be used as a rough proxy for the country as a whole. Looking at the numbers in that poll, and comparing to the 2002 Gallup national numbers, it suggests the Gallup question seems to result in Old-Earth and Young Earth creationists being lumped in together, along with Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution types being lumped in together.

The full breakdown is probably circa 30% YEC, 15% OEC, 15% ID, 25% TE, and 15% AE.

So: smaller, yes, but I wouldn’t call it “much” smaller.

 Actually, somebody older than 50 who went to public school probably has a better chance of learning evolution in public school. Schools started teaching evolution (and ignoring laws against it) in the 1940’s and especially in the 50’s because of the space race (emphasis on math and science). It wasn’t until the 60’s and 70’s that creationists started attacking evolution again. Now kids in public school science classes are lucky if the word evolution is even mentioned.

 How do they know how the deity intended for them to interpret it? And for that matter, why would an all-knowing all-powerful creator decide to tell people the most important things we should know in the most unreliable manner (written down in dead languages that could be edited and reinterpreted)??

 Are there actually atheist groups in the Congo? I’ve never heard of any. In fact a few of the worst groups I’ve heard of from that part of the world all espouse some sort of belief in a god.

What? I don’t even…

Oh come on, Ham cannot stand to even a 5 years old kid’s logic his scientists are not even in the fields he claims to posess the truth of. Anyway, i don’t see what your “tests” could prove, you just keep reapeating the same bullcrap until some idiot agrees with you.

  the Human Genome Project conducted the highest scientific mapping of the
human chromosomes and found that…mankind indeed derived from two
people.

Sources please. Mankind evolved from apes, it’s a fact, but not just two of them. Also, if you look up incest and consanguinty you’ll also see down syndrome attached to those practices.

If you would do a little research you would discover that the education
system in the USA had an illiteracy rate of under .1% when run by the
churches.

Again, sources please. Just pulling figures out of your ass does not make them true.

Reason this one: the ancient Text called the Bible says that God created
all things out of nothing while evolutionist say all the matter in the
universe just so happened to collect in one spot, compress to the size
of a golf ball and then…it just blew up!!!! Now which is the most
laughable?

So everything from nothing is a plausible explanation and something from something else is not, wow. You’re much more retarded than i thought.

Oh, here’s a gut ripper: all the water on the earth came from meteors
and comets that crashed through the atmosphere! Let’s say each
meteor/comet had 1000 gallons and weighed 10 tons…how many did it take
to cover the earth with water…wouldn’t all of that weight have spun
the earth farther out into space?  How did they all get past the great
space vacuum cleaner, Jupiter?

Oh my, please somebody shoot him, this man is obviously suffering from an extreme case of idiocy. I can just recommend thet you read some books about astronomy.

 All of your fruit is low hanging. The only reason it is easier to address Ken Ham than you is that Ken keeps his goalposts in place, whereas your “big game” doesn’t even present goalposts.

‘Useful’ does not equal ‘true.’

Can we, as a community, beg Christians – even just one Christian – to give us this sort of marked-up Bible?  Because how else are heathens to understand what is “true” and what isn’t?  Would any Christian* please step up and provide this valuable edited Bible?  I’ll happily provide a pack of highlighters, and they can use a different color for each different level of “truth.”

*other than Thomas Jefferson, that is.  Because modern Christians really wouldn’t like his edited version.

LOL.  I love it when religious nutbags argue over their different brands of complete nonsense.

I second that.  Just provide a list.  Surely you can do that, right?  

And that whole undead people walking around thing?  Are you seriously asking whether a story about a zombie is intended to be real or not?

 Not to mention that the story doesn’t at all mention Original Sin. That’s a Christian add on to a Jewish folk tale.

Well, it depends. One way to look at this without cherry picking is to ask how the community which wrote the text of Genesis likely viewed it and what they understood themselves to be doing and how that differs from the community that produced the four Gospels. If the former community understood what they were doing as metaphor (and I’m not saying that they did), then there is a sense in which the proper understanding of the text is as metaphor. But to show this, one needs to appeal to historical and anthropological work and to reach an abductive conclusion (i.e. given the known facts, what is the best explanation to explain those facts?)

I want to point out an additional thing that a text can do. A text can actually be both literal and metaphorical at the same time. How? Consider the movie/play “Inherit the Wind”. Superficially, this is a historical drama about the Scopes trial. How accurate it actually is is debatable. Nonetheless, the authors were really trying to express issues concerning McCarthyism. So, that production actually has two simultaneous meanings.

A friend of mine wrote a song which is simultaneously about a guy abusing a girl, coal mining in Southern Virginia (and the associated mountain top removal), and the persecution/exploitation of Native Americans. It features a personification of coal (a woman with dark black hair) who features into all three roles *at the same time*.

Art often has multiple meanings that are intended by the artist.

I see no reason why Biblical authors couldn’t have had several meanings in mind while producing their text, some metaphorical and some literal.

 That may be true, but we can also ask what he understands himself to be doing. To really engage him in argument is to seriously try to understand what Clark thinks Clark is doing, not just what he’s actually doing.

I thought about tring to educate Matt, though it seems like like he’s a lost cause. But in case he reads this, it’s possible for lesbians to have children not only through previous heterosexual marriages, but also through donor insemination and adoption. There are plenty of lesbian grandmothers out there!

Absolutely! The king coming back from the dead to save his people in their hour of need is a common theme in mythologised history.

Of course they have. Ever heard of the Jesus Seminar?

Of course. But as I said, “true” is meaningless in this context. Something that you do is neither true nor false, unless you mean that it’s true that some people do it.

Further to what linford86 said, not even non-religious historians of the Ancient Near East can agree on this.

There are some parts of the Bible known to be historical within the limits of ancient historians. (You’re dreaming if you think that Livy or Heroditus wrote down exactly what happened with no regard for contemporary politics!) There are some parts known to be based on fact, and embellished to varying degrees. There are some parts known to be pure myth. There are some parts known to be later fabrications. And there are some parts whose historical veracity is unknown.

But for a liberal Christian, this is interesting (and we do talk about current research a lot; we love this stuff), but sort of beside the point. There’s also a hell of a lot of the Bible which is teachings, or philosophy, rather than history, and hence impossible to call “true” or “false”, “literal” or “allegorical”.

Nobody disputes that the Levitical legal code, for example, was literally part of the Ancient Hebrew civil/religious code at some point in history, even if the story of how it came about is fanciful. In that sense, the Levitical laws are “literal” in pretty much any meaningful sense. But that doesn’t help in determining whether or not they should apply today. The intent behind it is clear from the text itself: the Ancient Hebrews thought themselves a nation “set apart”, and most of the bizarre laws were to support that. Even mainstream Christians (let alone ultra-liberals) believe that we’re not Ancient Hebrews and hence this doesn’t apply to us.

So let me give you an alternative interpretation.

The claim that all of the Bible is 100% literal journalistic/historical/scientific truth is a claim about all of the evidence. A single story which didn’t happen, a single character who didn’t exist, a single claim about nature which is historically inaccurate would break this claim completely. As such, this claim carries a very high burden of proof.

The claim that the Bible is 100% inaccurate is also a claim about all of the evidence. Non-existent people don’t say things or do things, so even one saying, deed or story which is better explained by it having happened than by it not having happened breaks this claim completely. So this clain also carries a very high burden of proof.

The claim that some of it is accurate (to varying degrees) and some of it isn’t is a claim about some of the evidence. As such, it carries a very low burden of proof. It should come as no surprise that this is the position of pretty much every historian of the Ancient Near East.

the only credible position is that the Bible is true in all it says or it is not. I think Ken Ham is doing a great work standing for the truth of Biblical Creation may God bless him and his ministry

 luckily that position is incredible, even to many christians.

You did know that they’re both agnostics, right?

Incidentally, my first thought on reading your comment is that you were making a reference to Chekov. Read into that what you will.