Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 12, 2008 11:20:29 GMT -4
You may not have noticed, but Jason is a debunker. More or less. I don't believe the Freemasons are trying to control the world, or that the moon landings were faked, or in the Illuminati, or that UFOs are the work of ETs, or that a flying saucer crashed at Roswell in the '40s, or that 9/11 was caused by the U.S. or Israelis, or that some contrails are chemical tests, or that the Holocaust was faked, or that Intelligent Design is an acceptable scientific alternative to evolution (yet), or even that it's been proven that humans are causing global warming (maybe we are, maybe we aren't). So yeah, I guess I could be called a debunker. On the other hand, I am a Mormon. And, as far as I can tell, the only Mormon who's a regular on this forum. That does put me at odds with the other regulars sometimes, because the LDS Church has made some pretty extraordinary claims.
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Post by Ranb on Mar 16, 2008 22:26:49 GMT -4
God exist!! and makes himself known "from within"..small inner voice,independent of ones consciouness I thought God made himself known by flooding the Earth and killing the first born? Ranb
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 16, 2008 23:45:07 GMT -4
Technically speaking, the flood was not intended as evidence of the existence of God. The 10th plague of Egypt was, in the sense that it was intended to convince Pharaoh that he could not fight the power of Moses, but he didn't stay convinced.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 17, 2008 9:15:13 GMT -4
I'd suggest that since the flood and the tenth plague did not happen, using them as evidence of the existence of God is entirely illogical. There is no evidence that either happened.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 17, 2008 11:24:19 GMT -4
Neither the flood nor the 10th plague were intended to be signs to us of the existence of God. After all, we weren't there to witness it. So in that regard it doesn't much matter if you accept them as having happened or not.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 17, 2008 11:50:23 GMT -4
Since those events didn't happen, one must conclude to be conjecture claims about the reasons for those events.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 17, 2008 12:08:02 GMT -4
It's impossible to prove that they didn't happen. Much of established history consists of stuff historians examined and said "well I have no reason not to believe this source, so we'll accept this account."
The point then turns on whether you accept the possibility of miracles. You obviously don't.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 17, 2008 12:14:12 GMT -4
We can certainly prove that there was no global flood. As to the 10th plague, one might think that this is something history would have noted. It did not. It reads like any other myth of that era.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 17, 2008 12:18:39 GMT -4
We can certainly prove that there was no global flood. Does the biblical account require a global flood? Only if it is read absolutely literally. And since if true it was acheived by extraordinary (some would say supernatural, although I've argued many times that there's no such thing) means in the first place, why should we expect it to have left the evidence that a completely natural flood would have? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. What sort of evidence should we expect to find? Inscriptions on Egyptian obelisks about how Pharaoh was humbled and defeated by his own slaves? That sounds more like the sort of thing the Egyptian powers-that-be would prefer to forget and suppress.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 17, 2008 12:33:59 GMT -4
Absence of evidence is absence of evidence. The historicity of the tenth plague has an equal amount of evidence as does the UFO following Halley's Comet. Saying that you don't expect any evidence does not mitigate the fact that there is no evidence.
There is no evidence for many of the myths of that era, Judeo-Christian or otherwise. There is no reason to believe a thing just because it is written down in a book of myths.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 17, 2008 15:24:58 GMT -4
Absence of evidence is absence of evidence. The historicity of the tenth plague has an equal amount of evidence as does the UFO following Halley's Comet. Except that there are at least three mainstream religions with billions of adherants that believe the plague occurred. Yes it does. If you expect evidence and don't find it then you have scored a point against the credibility of an event. If you don't expect evidence and don't find any then things are where they started. You seemed to think that not finding evidence of the 10th plague was noteworthy towards the credibility of the event. In fact we shouldn't expect to find any surviving evidence of the event beyond the biblical account and Jewish tradition.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 17, 2008 15:25:41 GMT -4
In fact at this point it would be rather suspicious if we did find new evidence for the event.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 17, 2008 15:38:54 GMT -4
Absence of evidence is absence of evidence. The historicity of the tenth plague has an equal amount of evidence as does the UFO following Halley's Comet. Except that there are at least three mainstream religions with billions of adherants that believe the plague occurred. Lots of people believe things that aren't true. That lots of people believe something does not make it true, nor is it evidence of any kind. By your standard, any wild claim out of the distant past is given credence by the fact that you can make a claim that you don't expect any evidence. That's not how it works. The lack of evidence does not support any claim about the reality of the thing for which there is no evidence.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Mar 17, 2008 15:42:19 GMT -4
Except that there are at least three mainstream religions with billions of adherants that believe the plague occurred. Lots of people believe things that aren't true. That lots of people believe something does not make it true, nor is it evidence of any kind. You asked for a reason, not a good reason. In any case, the fact that billions of people find something worth venerating in a work is a good indication that there may be something worth venerating. No, I was saying that failing to find evidence doesn't detract from the credibility of events from the distant past and isn't particularly noteworthy. I wasn't claiming that a lack of evidence makes the 10th plague more credible, but that the lack of evidence is not unexpected or noteworthy, as you seemed to think it was.
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Post by pzkpfw on Mar 17, 2008 15:45:25 GMT -4
Does the biblical account require a global flood? Only if it is read absolutely literally. And since if true it was acheived by extraordinary (some would say supernatural, although I've argued many times that there's no such thing) means in the first place, why should we expect it to have left the evidence that a completely natural flood would have? 1. Wouldn't a lack of evidence relegate this to "magic"? (Or supernatural causes?) 2. If you accept that maybe it wasn't global, why would it be unreasonable to accept it simply as a "natural" flood that has grown to mythic proportions via story telling? (Many older cultures apparently have similar flood myths).
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