wolfbiblemoon

An angel explains a vision of a sexually immoral woman sitting on a beast in the water, sort of. I think she's supposed to be Babylon, and she will be destroyed because of her immorality. But as the rest of the world already got destroyed it's no surprise that Babylon would go too.

All the throngs in heaven are happy about the whole thing and praise God for his sound judgements.

Jesus will finally get married once the world is all destroyed. And then ride out of heaven on a horse and kill the beast and his false prophet by throwing them into the lake of burning sulphur and killing the rest with the sword in his mouth.

Last day tomorrow!

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From:

blesserbeing.livejournal.com

The first two questions are somewhat pointless to ask me, since I believe in the Bible.

As for knowing my God created everything for sure, it is impossible to know, that is why it takes an amount of faith to believe. It doesn't take blind faith as some would tell you - for there is plenty of evidence - but it takes faith to believe in what Jesus says and faith to believe there is a God, b/c I can't physiically see them walking and talking everyday.

Some simple evidence (remember this doesn't 100% PROVE my view)
1. The universe is finite, therefore it was created at some point by something
2. Jesus was really here - plenty of writings on Jesus b/c of his miracles way back when (not just the gospels)
3. The generation of living matter from non-living matter would take over 15 billion years (the estimated age of the universe). But for our estimated earthly timeline to work correctly, this would have had to happen in 500 million years... roughly.
4. Historically correct things in the bible. (Old and New Testament) This includes the first bronze workings, cities built by Solomon, tribes, Sumerian Kings, etc.

I'm guessing your questions were mainly rhetorical though. It isn't possible to completely prove God, but the Bible is the most historically correct writing.

From:

bill_sheehan.livejournal.com

I'll return to the first two questions later, but let's leave them for now.

When you say you believe in the Bible, do you mean that you are an inerrantist? Do you really believe it is historically and factually accurate in all particulars? Were Adam and Eve real people, or an ancient myth?

As far as needing faith, I'm afraid I don't see why that should be necessary, or why you might consider it a virtue. You certainly wouldn't call it a virtue in any other area of your life. Faith is the excuse people give for believing without evidence or thought. It is the equivalent of saying that God created brains to have something to keep our ears apart. For example:

If everything needs a cause, what caused God? If everything needs a cause, why assume that the cause is godlike? Does everything indeed need a cause?

I'm not aware of any extrabiblical writings about Jesus and his miracles at any time that would be considered remotely contemporaneous to his life, but I'd certainly be interested in learning better. Can you provide citations or references?

Your third point is utter nonsense, which you are doubtless quoting from someone less honest than yourself.

Ruins of cities mentioned in the Bible have indeed be found. I just heard there's evidence that the walls of the city of Jericho were repaired 17 times in its history. So what? New York exists, but that doesn't mean Spider-man is real.

From:

blesserbeing.livejournal.com

How is my third point utter nonsense? Because it goes against what you believe? I read it in a book, written by a physicist with a doctoral degree. A test on the subject of non-living to living matter occurred in 1968. I'll have to reply again later to cite the test if you really intend on calling this utter nonsense. Kind of hurtful by the way.

I would love to cite any extrabiblical writings for you as well. You might be able to call me on this one, but I'm pretty sure their are, and I'm going to do a bible study on the case for christianity very soon. If I'm still commenting on this post, I'd be glad to talk about them.

As for the cause: I didn't say EVERYTHING needs a cause. Though all earthly things that we know need a cause. As for God, we don't know or can't know. God repeatedly says that He is, meaning he always has been. Scientists are able to conjure up theories about an infinite universe (though none of them are valid as the Standard Model is widely accepted), so we must be able to apply this to a god or God. Which seems much more likely. Showing that something must have created everything may be a weak link to the bible, but the bible gives us a valid creation of the universe as we know it.

The New York and Spiderman analogy may be valid, but comparing this simple, one city one superhero analogy to the Bible doesn't really line up. I believe all of the writings in the bible are based on true events and were written to be as accurate as possible, though in some cases they may have been written later than the event, causing a small amount of inaccuracy. Lists of kings, original tribes, Egypt, cities, bronze workings, Noah's Ark(?), Jerusalem and Israel and all of their historical sites, Solomon's cities, correct geography, the tower of Babel and more. Either these people corroborated to create the biggest lie ever told (which doesn't make sense bc they're all years apart, they were crazy with imagination, or they were telling the truth.

I won't address your talk on faith because it succeeds in being a nicely-worded opinion. Okay maybe I will, I think faith is very easily a virtue because without it loads of people would go crazy doing background checks on everyone they met, making sure they were telling their true name. I feel like you may think I'm still in the blind faith area for the basis of my beliefs. Anyway, that's my opinion.

I'll apologize for not really answering in order. I'm kind of unorganized like that I guess. Also, it's slightly annoying how livejournal has to keep making the reply columns less wide. And I will try to reply later with my utter nonsense, I recently wrote a persuasive paper on a topic that is sort of in this category of thought.

From:

blesserbeing.livejournal.com

Here is my living and non-living matter source.

This is from the book Genesis and the Big Bang, written by Gerald Schroeder, he has a PhD in Earth Sciences and Physics, an M.Sc in Earth and Planetary Sciences, and a B.Sc in Chemical Engineering.

In this particular excerpt about spontaneous generation, abiogenesis, or simply the generation of non-living matter to living he notes that before 1968 scientists were treating the idea of this forthcoming of life very lightly. Then Morowitz, a Physicist Professor at Yale University, decided to actually calculate the probability and time scale of this happening. Even with an optimistic outlook, he calculated this to take longer than the estimated age of the universe.

It should also be noted that there are A LOT of theories out there as to how this spontaneous generation occurred, which shows how much evolution scientists don't know about this subject. Or at least how much they are wrong.

From:

bill_sheehan.livejournal.com

As promised, the rest of my response is today's Sunday Sermonette. You can find it here: http://bill-sheehan.livejournal.com/196239.html

From:

bill_sheehan.livejournal.com

There is so much going on here that it is going to take multiple posts to respond. I think I'm going to save your first paragraph for my weekly Sermonette, because it is fractally wrong.

How can you say the Bible gives a valid account of the creation of the universe? It begins with creating light before the creation of the sun, and goes downhill from there! The Bible contains some lovely creation myths, but tells nothing that wasn't known to late Bronze-Age goat herders.

Your third paragraph sets up a false dichotomy. That a walled city called Jericho existed does not give credence to an account that its walls were topped by Joshua's horn-blowing troops. Noah's Ark? There is not the slightest bit of evidence that it ever existed outside of mythology. The existence of Pharoahs is known, but there is no evidence that anything told in Exodus ever happened or that Moses even existed. Ur-Patriarch Abraham? No record of his existence, let alone his conversations with angels or his impossible age. Tower of Babel? No evidence of a toppling ziggurat caused by confusion of languages.

Just because something like New York exists doesn't mean that stories about Spider-Man are true, or even the stories on Law and Order. The great grey-green greasy Limpopo River exists, but Kipling's "Just So" story about the Elephant's Child is a fable. The myths, legends, and just-so stories told by the Hebrews three thousand years ago give us information about a people and their values and beliefs, but does not contribute truth value to miracle claims.

Last night, I flew out of my second-story bedroom window and soared over the housetops. Do you believe me?

You don't know me very well, so your first reaction is probably that I'm lying. Your second is that I'm crazy. If you're feeling particularly charitable, you might think that I dreamt it. What would be required to convince you that I'm telling the truth?

I could send you a note from my wife, would that persuade you? How about a note from a neighbor? But of course they might just be in on the deception with me, mightn't they? A note from the priest who lives down the street? No?

How about a video? You could see it with your own eyes. But such things are fairly easy to fake, aren't they - we just saw 3-D ten-foot tall blue aliens flying on the backs of winged monsters. Let's face it, it would take an awful lot of evidence to persuade you that I actually did leave my bed and fly around my neighborhood in the middle of the night.

Now here is a Bible, a collection of stories written and compiled over a period of at least 1400 years. With the exception of a few letters, we don't know who wrote the stories. We don't have original manuscripts, or even copies of originals. We have copies of copies of copies, with some clear interpolations and redactions, based on evidence from other copies of copies. While certain historical facts can be verified - Nebuchadnezzer II reigned from 605 BCE to 562 BCE, give or take - we have no evidence at all that he tossed three men into a furnace and those men did not burn. Why - indeed how - can such a story be accepted as literal fact?

From:

blesserbeing.livejournal.com

I enjoyed reading your sermonette. It reminded me of Debate. Negative against Affirmative, both with seemingly contradictory evidence of the other party. Though this isn't necessarily true with our discussion. I noticed that you chose to say how my assertion and understanding of the non-living to living matter was incorrect, but failed to offer your view on the subject. (Or at least I forgot).

Also, if you remember, I did say that my assertions did not prove a God. Also I'm wondering, are you a complete atheist or more of an agnostic atheist? That seems like a silly question actually. But seeing as you agree with a finite universe, you must believe something created the universe. What are your thoughts as to this matter?

Also you are misinformed on the creation account within Genesis. There are a few different interpretations and in the book that I already stated above, the author gives a flawless account of the Big Bang matching up with the creation account. Haven't you ever wondered why it says "there was evening and there was morning - the first day?" Evening before morning? In the original Hebrew, this is translated as "there was disorder and there was order", showing how each day God made everything more orderly, which makes sense b/c with the law of thermodynamics, we know that everything is gradually moving towards disorder and chaos.

Besides that, if one were to believe that God did create the universe and believed that He was all-powerful or that he could do whatever He wanted, that person would know God could've created the universe in any order He wanted, and then set things into motion. Just because we can look at things now and mathematically calculate how all of this could have occurred in the past, does not mean that that is exactly how it happened. But of course this begs the question: does God have any limits? The most evidence I have on this would be in the Bible, and the Bible shows that God may have some limits, however undefinable they may be, but these are mainly in accordance to the world He made.

I realize this still does not change much. You know I realized, if Bill O'Reilly was smarter he could have at least begged the question "what causes gravity?", seeing as this is actually an unanswerable question. I think.

From:

blesserbeing.livejournal.com

Also on the extra-biblical writings, two extra-biblical writers were Josephus and Tacitus. Feel free to look them up. Tacitus didn't write much on this subject though.

From:

bill_sheehan.livejournal.com

Neither are contemporaries. Josephus was born at least four years after Jesus was already dead. The Testimonium Flavium is widely regarded as being at least partially an interpolation. Our oldest copy of Josephus' works is from the 11th century.

Tacitus was born in 56 CE. He reports about the existence of Christians, not about Jesus himself. And again, we cannot get any further back than an 11th century scribal copy.

Now the question again is, is it important? After all, we have equally poor evidence that Socrates existed. But the difference with Socrates is that it doesn't matter at all whether he was real man or a figment of Plato's imagination. It is his ideas that have survived the ages, and it makes no difference who said them first. If Jesus did not actually exist, however, it doesn't matter whether his ideas were good or bad (in my opinion, the recorded sayings of Jesus are mixed). The whole religion fails. So, not only do we have no original documentary evidence, or even copies of the originals, but medieval copies of copies of copies a thousand years after the original, and those copies were made by people who had both motive and opportunity to do a little embellishing just to burnish the historicity of their religion's central character. I'm not saying that was the case (although textual scholars can certainly point to thousands of errors and interpolations in Scripture alone), but it's certainly worth considering.

Look, let's pick this up on my blog. (http://bill-sheehan.livejournal.com/) I'll write something suitably controversial, and we can communicate without the constrictions of these tiny columns.

From:

bill_sheehan.livejournal.com

We have to move out of this forum. Not only are the columns too narrow to read, but I don't see it when you answer yourself.

Quickly, because I have very little time:

I'm afraid I don't recognize your distinction in the term "atheist." Atheism is simply an answer to the question, "Do you believe in a god or gods?" If the answer is anything other than "yes," congratulations: you're an atheist.

Agnosticism is an answer to the question, "Do you know that there is a god or gods?" If your answer is anything other than "yes," you're an agnostic.

As you can see, it is possible to be both.

You are begging the question by asking about what created the universe. It's like asking who caused the Japanese earthquake. The question is better framed as "How did the universe come to exist?" My thoughts are: Haven't the faintest. Why? Is it important?

If so, is it important to you to know the truth, or to have a quick and glib answer?

If you want the truth, how do you usually go about finding out what is true or not? Do you just look for the oldest book or listen to the loudest person?