Who come first the theist or the atheist

No, it's not a faith, because it's based on evidence and could be theoretically contradicted by emerging evidence.

 

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Precisely.

An alien perusing this thread might conclude that theism is the inability to comprehend this.

 

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Good question!

In the beginning was the God.
How is God, atheist or theist?

 

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I do comprehend this, but they need to sit down and discover faith. Who are these aliens?

 

He is unbelieving of a God above his existence, but can not say for certain.

 

Religion is based on stories, stories gone misunderstood.

 

lol
and what form would that theoretical evidence take?

 

actually he is talking of the knowledge base of a new born child being maintained through to adulthood - doesn't matter whether the subject is physics, religion or modern history - the result is the same : ignorance

Then you are talking about explicit atheism ... which clearly comes after theism

It's hard to imagine any high end knowledge base that is devoid of elements of superstition - eg. marrying reductionist views of consciousness with physics etc etc
:shrug:

 

AID-

You did no analysis of the artefacts, nor have you read any actual studies on them. I doubt you even read the books you quote from. Instead, you take an idea of how Religion evolved gleaned from reading the propaganda in the Modern Atheist community online and then find the authority quotes from websites and suchlike to post as if that’s convincing. I on the other hand spend 9 years and a boatload of money to learn from various professors who would laugh in your face if you tried to present this, and not all of them were Theists.

You aren’t letting the artefacts speak. This is like when a goofy Evangelical decides that Allah was a moon god and post pictures of an Idol from Mecca with a crescent on his chest, or like the statues of the Goddess found in Europe used by Neo-Pagans, especially Wiccans, to prove how their beliefs are 10’000 years old. I’ve seen this bunk before, and it always falls apart if you look into it.

What camp do I represent in your Mind, exactly? Because I do hate being called an apologist for telling people what actual Scholarship says.

Boas was not discussed at length because gosh shucks, I wanted to discuss the specific linguistical argument you made. You completely evaded it. Now I’m just telling you, Boas was not a Hebrew Scholar and had no relevance in the study of the Hebrew Language, and your argument that Elohim was Polytheistic is an absurdity.


However, I will say this, if you rest too heavily on one man you are a fool. Boas’s observations will be filtered through his own understanding of the world, and be influenced by his own Biases and presuppositions. That is not an insult, that’s True of literally everyone. While you may say that you did use other sources, your defence of Boas here is weak because it doesn’t matter what he saw, his observations, while valuable, cannot be the final absolute Authority.

That’s nice but, you still have no actual evidence linking Elohim with “the gods” like you previously stated. I also see goal post moving in the distance…

Then you confirm that you are a fool because you refuse to even reconsider something that you decided was True and facts are immaterial to you. How, exactly, do you differ from the Fundamentalists you oppose?

It is not a semantic. Your argument that Elohim really means the gods and that Bible Translators deceive people by translating it as God rests entirely on Elohim being a Literal Plural and the original Readers understanding it as “the gods”. This can’t be True die to the Verb tense. Your claim that we don’t know for sure how the Ancient Hebrew language worked and at best I know a reconstruction works against you as well, because you don’t even know the modern reconstruction, much less what the Ancients knew, so don’t bring that back up.

The only material facts we have show us a singular entity being addressed in Genesis 1. We have no evidence that the word Elohim was meant as a plural and ample evidnce it was meant as a Singular.

I don’t want to marshal troops, I want to make a point of valid scholarship. Simply out, you can’t claim Elohim is plural as the Grammar won’t allow for it.

By the way, your worldview also denies History, and I highly doubt you can read the Hebrew and you also rely on English Translations. Don’t you think it hypocritical, and in fact silly, for you to castigate others?

OR should I post my next post in Hebrew?

Are you a complete idiot? I am sorry but, your argument is untenable. I mean, I have Bibles, in English, which discuss the linguistical origins of the words at length, and many of them are used by Fundamentalists. I own a Holeman Christian Standard that discuses El, for instance. All you need to do is walk into a Christian bookstore and find he Right study Bible and you get this.

However, all Languages gain words from earlier Languages. The modern English word “God” was originally from “Goden” which was derivative of “Odin”. That doesn’t, however, prove that modern Christians are Polytheistic.


Even if El was a term borrowed from a Polytheistic culture, it doesn’t prove that the Hebrew writers of Gen 1 were.

It becomes even worse for your argument when you look into the word El, because like most Ancient words its actual origins are obscure. We don’t know exactly where it came from or what it originally meant and have no direct evidenced that the Ancient Hebrews borrowed it, or if it was the other way round.

Still, even if El was the name of a pagan god, that doesn’t mean anything. You’d have to prove that the Hebrews used El as the same god, and also believed in other gods. You can’t show that by merely showing the borrowed the word itself.

But its not inescapable, it’s speculative and based on unjustified free association.

I will argue that it may have come First, and I read articles even by Atheists who said this. The argument goes that originally the Ancients believed in an overarching spirit, and later on applied spirits to rivers, trees, and other objects, so that gods began to multiply. If this Theory is True, then Monotheism would have had to come First.

But would saying that really make me a Fundamentalist to you?

 

AID, do you even know what Faith is?

 

How about the beginning of human awareness? That would seem to lead to the question of whether theism came first.

Who were these early people and what did they think about the world, and why?

Imagine the time that passed from the dawn of human intelligence until the first day someone said "God" (in some language we may never know).

That time span could have been 100,000 years... maybe more.

What were they thinking during all of that history, if they didn't even have a concept of God?

 

Any person who would come upon this thread with no prior information to guide them.

God is not certain if there is a greater God? Why?

 

ZAV,

Flame on, bro.

Here is Asherah, the putative consort to El and Queen of Heaven (Jer 7:18 and Jer 44:17–19, 25), and by Ugarit tradition the mother of 6 dozen Elohim, also associated with Ba'al:

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citing Robert Gnuse, PhD

citing Johanna Stuckey, PhD, Asherah and the God of the Early Israelite

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and

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citing Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, Oxford University Press (2001)

citing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(god)#Hebrew_Bible

finally:

citing Bible's Buried Secrets, Did God have A Wife, BBC, 2011

Here is a NOVA trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sw-NFvueK8

Here is the full length program: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/bibles-buried-secrets.html

 

Saying I am flaming you really doesn’t advance your argument. Look mate, you still haven’t provided any evidence in regards to my specific statements. UI myself, several posts back, said the Bible recorded Israelites practicing Polytheistic worship. It doesn’t really prove anything, well, other than the Bible was correct. That’s one reason I find people like you rather dull witted, as you think these things somehow invalidate the Bible when instead its exactly what it described.

However, what you just posted doesn’t prove that the specific Author of the First Chapter of Genesis was a Polytheist, as you initially claimed. It doesn‘t prove that Polytheism came before Monotheism. All you have done is to once again post irrelevant portions of books you haven’t Actually read and projected onto them a meaning they don’t have to win an argument no one else is engaged in.

 

Now, I will ask you again, please focus, don’t call it a semantic, And address the specific point I made.


You specifically said that Genesis One was written by the Elohimits, following a crude understanding of the Documentary Hypothesis. You then said that Bible Translators obscured the Truth by calling Elohim God, when it should be the gods, and that the text was written by Polytheists. I quoted you saying specifically this. You did not say initially that Elohim was left over from earlier languages that came from Polytheistic Cultures, but that the text of Gen 1 was itself a Polytheistic text.

It can’t be, because the verb tense is singular.

Now, either explains why the verb tense is singular for a plural subject, or else admit you were mistaken. Don’t tell me this is my problem, and don’t redirect to some unrelated culture or presumed past linguistical association.


Just admit that Gen 1 was itself written by Monotheists.

 

God knows.

 

hence the notion that the type of atheism you represent being open to evidence of god is certainly very theoretical .....

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Yes. But consider this;

http://zarbi.posterous.com/god-and-evidence-a-strident-proposal




And this by PZ Myers:

The nature of this god is always vague and undefined and most annoyingly, plastic — suggest a test and it is always redefined safely away from the risk. Furthermore, any evidence of a deity will be natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties which god is exempted from by the believers' own definitions, so there can be no evidence for it. And any being who did suddenly manifest in some way — a 900 foot tall Jesus, for instance — would not fit any existing theology, so such a creature would not fit the claims of any religion, but the existence of any phenomenon that science cannot explain would not discomfit science at all, since we know there is much we don't understand already, and adding one more mystery to the multitude will not faze us in the slightest.

So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let's stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.​

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/10/its_like_he_was_reading_my_min.php

 

@ZAV and Aqueous ID

Lets take a look at an excerpt of the text:

"26, And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

http://www.theskepticalreview.com/tsrmag/1poly94.html

If you follow the link you will find:

Source: Polytheism in Genesis:
Baal and Ashtoreth vs. Yahweh
by Sol Abrams

1994 / January-February


Incidentally, if you Google "genesis was written by polytheists" Abrams is first in the list, followed in second by this thread:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ge...s=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a


Additionally:

Source wiki

I am not sure if you have covered this ground already, as I haven't read the whole thread.

 

We could also say that as Jesus is a separate entity to god, yet with godlike powers, the New Testament at least was written by polytheists? I would interpret it that way anyway.

We could also say that the man who reads anything in the bible, and takes it literally, is a fool.