Carol Clouser
Unregistered
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Lenny,
Thanks for responding. But you haven't resolved the mysteries. I use no poisons or products of chemical companies of any kind. I run an all natural operation and the groundhogs, rabbits and red foxes are flourishing and having offspring on my property. I guess I will have to put on my scientist hat again and do the hard work myself.
Corkscrew,
(1) It is well known that rulers in the olden days could easily eliminate any palace or priestly scribes and their writings that displeased them. This also means that the scribes wrote with that fact on their plates. Unless a point is corroborated from multiple and diverse sources, it is just not reliable.
(2) My point about Jews was to highlight the fact that these are by no means village idiots offering their testimony.
(3) I must disagree with you on the comparison to the seriousness of other religious beliefs. The Greek and Roman conquerers would readily confirm that. Tiny Judea gave the Romans much more trouble than all the conquered peoples in their entire empire combined. I do not even see Christians today capable of refraining just from pork, prohibited by the Bible they accept, just one of a multitude of restrictions Jews abide by every day. The entire history of Christianity is based on finding excuses for not living the restricted and disciplined life demanded by the holy book they themselves accept as such. I do see seacrifice in Islam, unfortunately it is misdirected toward evil.
(4) After 2000 years of handwritten Hebrew Bibles from generation to generation, under the most trying and challenging of conditions, the Dead Sea Scrolls (talk about evidence!) confirmed that they were all almost perfectly identical to what they had two thousand years earlier. No more than a handful of letters out of 300,000 diverged and these were not meaningful differences. I don't know about you, but I am impressed. There is no reason to assume that an even older document that may be found tomorrow would go against this trend.
(5) I am well aware that none of this constitutes "proof" of divine inspiration. It does make it highly unlikely however that some character foisted an original document full of lies on these intelligent, stubborn people at some point and got them all to believe, not just that it was true, but that they had heard all these things from their fathers, and their fathers and mothers told them that they had heard these things from their fathers, and so on, going back to all their fathers and mothers all of whom themselves participated in the exodus and the other events of the Bible. Unlike Christianity and Islam where the foundational experienes, as described by their own testimonial documents and stories, occured to individuals out of sight of the multitudes.
(6) None of this constitutes science. But science is not the only path to the truth. You and we all live our lives that way too. You base actions on facts derived via methods that are anything but scientific. Many an accused has been sentenced to death, and correctly so, on the basis of testimonial evidence.
(7) None of this is the basis of my interest in the Bible. You will probably not be able to relate to this, but I will mention it anyway. After studying and analyzing the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud and the multiude of other commentaries, enough material to fill huge libraries, I can tell you that I am most impressed by the wisdom, beauty and unsurpassed ethical standards that I find therein.
(8) I am not here to preach. I don't care what you believe. I am just engaging in debate and discussion. Neither I nor any Jewish organization that I am aware of is actively pushing to inject ID into any public classroom.
And this post has gotten to be much too long for me.
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