[Zhavric]

Quote by: tivodan1116 Spam Deleted

Where did I say early Christians "picked and chose arbitrarily"? What I said was that the books of the Bible were assembled very recently, relatively speaking.

And we both know there are "gospels" which were left out on purpose. Ergo, Christians pick and choose not only what they believe in the bible, but what went into the bible in the first place.

The early Christians did they best they could to assemble what they thought were the correct books.

Right. They took the ones that agreed with the dogma they wanted to present and chucked all the rest. It had nothing to do with spirituality or the inspired word of god. They wanted to present a semi-cogent tale of a godman.

Spam Deleted the process continues even today - different denominations of Christianity use different books and different "Bibles" contain different books - 1 Esdras and Psalm 151 being found in the Orthodox Bible, for example.

That's called "picking and choosing". Tivodan, I know you have the volconvo disease that causes you to instantly knee-jerk out the opposite of whatever I say, but be reasonable here. The issue right now is whether the Christians pick and choose things out of the bible. Yelling about how Christians pick and choose stuff to go into the bible isn't helping your cause.

You still haven't responded to the point I have previously made, which is that your argument against Christians (and in particular me) is precisely the same flawed argument style that you ridicule of Creationists:

T, you've got the volconvo disease. What's the point? If I say down, you'll parrot "up!". If I say the sky looks blue, you'll find a reason to say it doesn't. If you want to debate honestly, then fine, but you're going to need to drop out of the Kame/Fonceai/Helio coterie and embrace intellectually honesty.

1) The Bible is an all-or-nothing proposition and every word must be 100% confirmed for any of it to be true (the theory of evolution is an all-or-nothing proposition ...)

Straw man. I have no idea what you mean by "evolution is an all-or-nothing" proposition nor does it even slightly relate to the bible. ToE is a proven fact that's been well documented by scientists around the world for decades if not longer. The bible is a set of folk tales that children are indoctrinated to believe as fact from an early age. Evolution has evidence. The bible has none. I sense the rest of your argument is going to be just another ill-conceived attempt to label evolution / science as a form of religion... along the lines of "you won't accept that 1+1=3 so you're close minded!" or in this case "You're being intellectually honest and agreeing with a scientifically supported theory so that makes you the same as a fundamentalist Christian." If that's your whole argument I'm going to be disapointed, but not surprised.

2) Any disagreement among Christians regarding what parts or books of the Bible are correct or incorrect renders the entire thing moot (Any disagreement among evolutionary scientists ...)

Yup. So far, I'm right.

Again, disagreements amongst scientists are supported by evidence and reason. Disagreements on what goes into the bible or which parts of the bible people believe are completely arbitrary. Take for example an eye for an eye versus turn the other cheek. The OT prescibes the first and the NT prescribes the second. Christians do neither. Their morality is somewhere in between. So why even bother with the bible? Ignoring both edicts renders it ultimately useless. I predict that you won't reply to this part.

3) Most importantly, if one part of the theory, like Genesis, is found to be false, it's ALL false (if one part of the theory, like Piltdown Man, is found to be false, it's ALL false)

What rubbish? First, science is a system of inquiry that's self-correcting. If we find evidence that helps us understand something, we'll gladly toss out or refine an older theory to make way for the new one... provided there's evidence. The transition from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics is a great example. Second, the issue with the bible isn't "if one part is wrong it's all wrong". The issue is that liberal Christians think they somehow get to decide which parts (even the most black and white ones) apply to them and which don't. I've been asking Christians for MONTHS to provide their test for how they seperate figurative from literal and I've yet to hear any answer. So, can you tell me why Genesis is figurative and why the resurrection (which is every bit as impossible) is literal?

I'll take a page from your book

This is, by far, the most intelligent thing you've ever stated on volconvo.