It has to be properly decoded, carefully reverse engineering various corruptions, misunderstanding, rewritings, misperceptions, etc. Virtually no one is up to that task.
Those that aren't, though, are completely unaware of that fact and talk loud and with certainty about the Bible anyway.
Doesn't that at the very least demonstrate that it's not inspired word of a divine being? Or if it is, then that divine being clearly doesn't give a shit about preserving his message through the ages.
Which obviously doesn't mean that everything in the bible is false. I'm sure it contains a wealth of priceless historical knowledge.
But when it starts talking about the supernatural, or when people start citing it as a default authority on truth, that's where you lose me.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
I completely agree with everything you said. One of the most fascinating things is how the story of Noah's flood is being validated in some ways, and exactly as you said that is one of the stories that far far predates the old testament.
Now we have prominent scientists and archeologists openly discussing the growing evidence for a world wide flooding event that would've wiped out most if not all civilizations on the planet. And not just one major catastrophic flood, but a series of them spread over a few thousand years.
And what I find really interesting is that the time frame for this flooding puts it at the very dawn of pre-history; the earliest known beginnings of human civilization.
Which seems to strongly imply that the stone age wasn't civilization starting, but rather civilization RE-starting. Which just begs at the mystery of how far along humans had developed before the cataclysm.
Our civilization went from the bronze age to the internet age in 5,000 years. Meanwhile our ancestors before the cataclysm would've had hundreds of thousands of years of a stable environment to develop in.
Enough time for space faring civilizations to rise and fall several times over.
Have you considered the possibility of ancient scripture simply being inaccurate?
It has to be properly decoded, carefully reverse engineering various corruptions, misunderstanding, rewritings, misperceptions, etc. Virtually no one is up to that task.
Those that aren't, though, are completely unaware of that fact and talk loud and with certainty about the Bible anyway.
Doesn't that at the very least demonstrate that it's not inspired word of a divine being? Or if it is, then that divine being clearly doesn't give a shit about preserving his message through the ages.
Which obviously doesn't mean that everything in the bible is false. I'm sure it contains a wealth of priceless historical knowledge.
But when it starts talking about the supernatural, or when people start citing it as a default authority on truth, that's where you lose me.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
I completely agree with everything you said. One of the most fascinating things is how the story of Noah's flood is being validated in some ways, and exactly as you said that is one of the stories that far far predates the old testament.
Now we have prominent scientists and archeologists openly discussing the growing evidence for a world wide flooding event that would've wiped out most if not all civilizations on the planet. And not just one major catastrophic flood, but a series of them spread over a few thousand years.
And what I find really interesting is that the time frame for this flooding puts it at the very dawn of pre-history; the earliest known beginnings of human civilization.
Which seems to strongly imply that the stone age wasn't civilization starting, but rather civilization RE-starting. Which just begs at the mystery of how far along humans had developed before the cataclysm.
Our civilization went from the bronze age to the internet age in 5,000 years. Meanwhile our ancestors before the cataclysm would've had hundreds of thousands of years of a stable environment to develop in.
Enough time for space faring civilizations to rise and fall several times over.