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Some months ago someone posted here a thread about bible self-contradictions, and Dan Silverman did his best to explain them away.



You speak of it as if Dan Silverman's un-scholarly objections were the end all of any intelligent objections to supposed contradictions. Which I assure you isn't the case.

No offense to Dan, or in any case myself since I also tried, but he simply isn't qualified to refute such nonsense. Not that it takes much qualification, but it takes more than your average believer. The half-baked ideas of skeptics desperate to find any contradiction at all in the bible, actually do require some work to overcome if only because their crock is, on the surface, somewhat convincing to the uninformed (without exception this seems to include nearly every single atheist on the planet, though they make no attempt at humility on the subject as is showcased in what you said here).

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Just like a good novel the bible begins right with a mystery. Genesis 1 describes how the Gods created the world step by step in the following order:

Light -> Heaven -> Earth & Seas -> Plants -> Water Animals -> Land Animals -> Men & Women.

Right on the next page, there's a different creation story. It's only one God this time, who created the world in this order:

Earth & Heavens -> Man -> Plants -> Animals -> Woman



This argument is aged, but unlike a fine wine it only gets worse.

http://www.tektonics.org/jedp/creationtwo.html
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i4/genesis.asp

I wouldn't put my stock in skeptics who refuse to take themselves out of their own cultural context, and who instead read the bible more literally than even fundamentalist christians do.

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Is it possible that the editor of the bible didn't notice this apparent contradiction? Hardly.



You seem to have the right ideas, just the wrong conclusions. Did it ever occur to you that the reason they didn't notice the 'contradiction' is that, because in the right context it actually isn't a contradiction? No, instead they purposefully added the contradiction, hoping no one would notice a reversal of order and the number of creators. Right...that sounds reasonable.

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1. It's not one god but a pantheon that created the world. (This part was censored from your King James Bible, but the original text uses the word 'elohim' which is plural). This is not a Christian belief, as the Lord forbids to believe in other Gods.



It never occured to you to possibly examine what happens during the translation process?

http://www.tektonics.org/lp/monoelohim.html

Furthermore, I have a New King James Version sitting right in front of me, that isn't censored (according to your standards). Of course, the censorship charge only applies if the bible really refers to multiple gods as having participated in creation week. Which is probably doesn't, unless a conspiracy theory is more likely than examining the writings in the proper context. I would rather not ally myself with atheist conspiracy nonsense, but to each his own.

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2. The description of the heaven - a vault with water above it - was exactly the Babylonian world view, which in turn had roots in cuneiform writings of the Sumerians from 1500 years earlier. So we have an essential heathen creation story here.



http://www.tektonics.org/af/babgenesis.html

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3. The order of creation - from the simple to the complex, starting with light - mimics the Big Bang and Evolution Theory. In fact Darwin could have got his ideas from the bible. However, evolution is also seen as non-Christian by some, otherwise the US fundamentalists weren't so scared of it.



Its differences speak more loudly than its similarities. For instance, the fact that it only took a week to create everything.

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So we have to conclude: more than 2500 years ago someone smuggled a heathen, evolutionist text to the very beginning of the bible! He even led our attention to it by putting standing out contradictions next to it. The question is now: what did he want to tell us? Is Evil everywhere?

Or might there be another explanation?




There is another explanation. You're just plain wrong.



By the way, if you have any objections to what Tektonics has to say, feel free to e-mail them and be thoroughly embarrassed.

Last edited by Irish_Farmer; 12/04/06 02:31.
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