My usual response. “You do know that malnutrition makes people hallucinate?”
I mean hell, anyone can test this themselves. Just restrict your daily vitamin E for long enough and I bet you’ll be seeing people walking on water in no time.
I mean, you’ll also do irreparable harm to your heart and nervous system, but you’ll be seeing some crazy shit first hand as well.
“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” ― John Dominic Crossan
To be fair, that list would be a sick D&D campaign
Agreed but I want to point out that “bronze age desert dwellers” made plenty of scientific advances and invented large parts of our culture. I mean hell, part of the story happens around Rome itself. Even the stories invented in the heads of these people, while untrue, fascinate us to this day. These people also found their own stories compelling and believable by the way. This isn’t to excuse modern Christianity in any way, but just to point out that it’s a critical thinking problem and not a stupidity problem.
A lot of them were also understood to be parables, obfuscations, and metaphors but Europeans in the early 300s lacked a decent grasp of literary concept. In particular there are two tellings of the demolishment of the walls of Jericho. There's the one where the trumpet blast did it, but there's also the one where the trumpet blast was a signal to the sappers under the walls to knock out the support beams they'd rigged while they were working to undermine the foundations of the wall
a whale isn't a fish!! it's a mammal.
my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Plants grew before there was sunlight
I need an explanation for this one
yeah the only way i can square it would be that they're making a distinction between the general "light" available on day 1 - and very well publicised - vs the more specific creation of the sun and moon and stars later on (day 3? maybe ) .
I'm guessing that god probably got bored of having to invoke the voice activated light switch each time , so by day 3, decided to subcontract the sun to do it.
Even if he did forget to do the lights again on day 2 there might have been some emergency grow lights set up that the authors of genesis thought might slow down the plot so skipped over - either way I'm sure the plants'd have been fine for a day.
Wait the Zombies in Jerusalem part is from World War Z
Put like that it sounds awfully like an LSD bad trip. Scary stuff.
Number 6 is technically correct. On a human timescale, the sun does stand still. On a universe timescale, it's moved around a bit.
I think the implication is that the sun was in the same position in the sky, meaning the earth stopped spinning without everyone being launched sideways at 1,000mp/h
Also, how do you have a 'day' without the earths rotation? Do they just mean 24 hours? It's like the days in Genesis, apparently the sun was made on the fourth DAY. That one's a head scratcher. Also, God made light on day 1. What light? God's fucking flashlight?
And one final interesting fact, our sun is actually moving at 200km/s, as is earth, and everything else in our solar system, as it moves around the milky way.
Debunking shit in the Bible really feels like you're that guy who is deliberately looking for plotholes while watching a movie and everyone else going "shut up you're ruining it", but you know the movie is trash and makes no fucking sense.
And one final interesting fact, our sun is actually moving at 200km/s, as is earth, and everything else in our solar system, as it moves around the milky way.
To be fair, nothing is ever stationary except in very specific frames of reference. I think it's usually fair to say that the sun is stationary because most of the time when we discuss observations involving the sun, those observation happen within our solar system so the sun is the frame of reference. Otherwise you'd have to constantly point out that a house, tree, mountain or whatever is not stationary, because it moves with the earth.
Yep. Just being pedantic for the sake of it lol. A lot of people don't realize our solar system is flying through space at astronomical speed.
I suppose technically the only thing which is stationary is the center of the universe.
I feel like the words "but believe" could be struck from this meme.
Bro if you've ever been on a cruise ship (I haven't) you will know that the boat thing is kinda doable