Who come first the theist or the atheist

Why should they "just let God be"?

What would be in it for you if theologians would have faith in their God and just let God be?

 

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@ZAV

The dialogue got unmanageably long. Let me pare it back again:

It seems almost certain that the God of the Jews evolved gradually from the Canaanite El, who was in all likelihood the 'God of Abraham'...If El was the high god of Abraham - Elohim, the prototype of Yahveh - Asherah was his wife, and there are archeological indications that she was perceived as such before she was in effect 'divorced' in the context of emerging Judaism of the seventh century B.C.E. (See 2 Kings 23:15)
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-The Oxford Companion To World Mythology (David Leeming, Oxford University Press, 2005, page 118)

Furthermore:

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-Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 902.

 

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No. On evidence. And rational inference. Nothing like faith.

No. In that case all scientists would be priests.

Right. No return tickets came with the DNA. It's one way trip to nowhere.

 

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Or has your lack of faith done that?

 

I have strong faith in psychology.

In the example wynn cited, religious phobia exacerbates the disorder.

Did you catch that nuance?

wynn keeps feeding me evidence.

on the cool, we're a team.

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Want psychological findings on faith? Good luck on that. Their are 144 thousand of us to exist between the birth of Johnny Cash, and the end of the angelic generation cycle. Some traits of a faithful.

-Confidence
-Quick talker
-Uncluttered mind
-BIG BIG white eye balls
-Worry free.

You should never have faith in another mans work without knowing them first, they are proven liars by generality.

Whats the disorder? Religious phobia? Fear of death? A faithful looks in the eyes of death and says Im back.

 

AID-

You seem to be missing as vital point. I don't care id you think that the God of Abraham evolved from El, the High God, I really don't. We can discuss that later. All I want from you right now is acknowledgement that Genesis chapter 1 does not say "the gods in the original Hebrew. You can't prove that by the quote you posted. It wouldn’t matter if originally some ancestors of those writing the text were Polytheists or the God they spoke of was originally a High God, all that matters in this instance is the text itself. You cannot prove the text of Genesis was written by Polytheists who meant it to be reads "the gods" by looking at speculations on where their ideas evolved from. The question is what the text says. Period. Nothing else matters right now.


The fact is that Elohim is only a Grammatical Plural, and in Hebrew the Verb determines if its an actual plural in the sentence. The verb is still singular and not plural, meaning Elohim can't possibly be "the gods" and your statement that its a mistranslation remains utterly false.

Nothing about possible origins of Monotheism, Canaanite Religion in the surrounding region, or your speculations based on a long dead Anthropologists writings dealing with a totally different culture matter. All I am speaking about is the word Elohim and why this word is not always a plural in the Hebrew language. All I want from you is either an admission that you were wrong, or some actual evidence that it was written by polytheists and they meant "the gods" that explains the numerous discrepancies such as the singular verb or instances in which Elohim is used to refer to known individual entities and not a plurality.


Can you discuss that point without veering off into unrelated speculations on how Monotheism developed? Because I really don't see how it connects to what I've said already and have also already stated I will cover the rest of your arguments later. All I am discussing now is this one part.


Can you prove that Elohim was meant to be read as “the gods” by it as original Authors, and explain the Grammatical point I made? If not, then why must we assume the people that wrote the text were themselves Polytheists? Your specific claim about the Hebrew passage in Genesis 1 is what we are discussing here. Nothing else. You assert that Biblical translators hide the Truth by translating it “god’ and it should be “the gods”, but this is not really True when you actually read the text in Hebrew. You cannot prove that they who wrote the First Chapter of the creation Account were Polytheists by quoting someone else saying that the idea behind Hebrew religion may have developed out of veneration of a High God. That is not material to the actual texts statements. Even if we accept it for now for the sake of argument, that only proves their ancestors were Polytheists, not that they were or that the Genesis 1 Creation account was Polytheistic.

Now, all I ask is that you prove that Elohim was meant to be plural whilst dealing with the specific objections I made. I don’t care about the rest and we can discuss it later.

As it is now, I’m discussing the modern British Constitution and you are discussing law under the Stuart Dynasty.

 

Oh one more thing, your referenxce to -Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, p. 902 actually supports my contention. it says Elohim may have been the Creator god of the early Israelite Polytheism. In addition to the "May have been" aspect, which you ignore becsuse you dislike any ther option, the fact remains itsa god, not the gods. You claim that Genesis1 is Polytheistic becsuse Elohim is Plural, and should be the gods. But if Elohim is the Creator god of asa Polytheistic Israelite culture, then Elohim is a specific name of a specific god, not a word indicating a Pantheon.

I do wonder if you read your own sources.

 

It seems strange what theologians do. How religious sects exists with bickering over God's qualities almost implicitly denies that God can be divine. The old Judaic notion of not defining God much had a lot going for it.

What might I get out of it. A better life as society could be more harmonious. Children could be raised with virtually no theology and a sense of ethics founded on reasons to make society good rather than arbitrary fear of the divine. Then when the faith wears off later, they won't be so likely to say, what the hay, why be good?

 

Not true; daily life is almost a continual process of dealing with cause and effect. Scientific findings also deal with cause and effect, and so, the personal analysis process transfers to them.

After a lifetime of no success in searching for God, a high level of skepticism seems quite reasonable.

Open up the interpretation process much more in this case. I'm agnostic, and so it is reasonable that hope can extend beyond this life. I disagree with the Christian notion that faith has any relation whatsoever with a potential afterlife. That is why theology can be so simple, I say. Theology has a function of producing ideas to support faith, and without much need for faith, less theology is needed.

(See above) in this life and maybe in an afterlife.

 

Yes, I enjoy these materials for the myths they bust. You will find lengthy analysis in the reference I gave if you care to research it. It's truly amazing how ancient religions shared common ancestral ideations of horror, guilt and punishment by the forces of nature they did not understand.

Boas' work is old enough to capture primitive cultures before civilization altered them, and young enough to be relevant. I did not introduce Boas, your camp did, thru wynn. I merely rebutted that Boas supports your camp's position, by citing him. Boas was an eyewitness, therefore not easily dismissed as you think.

The last two cites were given:

(1) to rebut your claim that Semitic and Ugaritic roots are uncorrelated
(2) to demonstrate the polytheistic nature of the proto-Israelites
(3) to demonstrate the common thread, as far away as the ends of Phoenicia, to the mythical El of Hebrew lore.

You are particularly focused on the semantics of Elohim. You claim mastery of something in connection with Hebrew. A lexicon, apparently, but what good is that without the artifacts to support the context? My contention is that at best you can only master some variant of the modern incarnation. The original was dead in the common sense, that is, was not the common speech of any society, for about 2 millennia. It wouldn't even matter if it had never died out. People today have no connection to the cultural implications of the words they casually toss around, believing that the lexicon, merged with personal ideation, reveals the meaning. For the same reason, it's irrelevant whether cantors have kept it alive in the synagogues.

By way of analogy, ancient Hebrew is as lost to you as is the mythology from which the meaning of the story emerged. So the semantics discussion will never pay off for you. You might as well trash all the artifacts and start your own Version 2.0.

If you wish, you can try to explain the first sentence of Genesis within the context of the Semitic-Ugaritic link.

From the cultural artifacts, we have:

El = Chief god of the Ugarit/proto-Israelite tradition
El(ohim) = Sons of God (usu., the lesser deities)

Now we need a singularized plural grammar for the Sons of God:

Collective form (plural sense, singular number) = Pantheon

Translation:

In the beginning the Pantheon created..(etc)

Then the mixed number grammatical form conveys the apparent meaning.

They were polytheists in their earliest days. Deny it, but only in a protective bubble, to preserve your creed, not to serve historical facts and evidence.

This is why I say your posts fall. It's not me toppling them - it's the artifacts of history, the crush of all that clay.

 

You are thinking about the problem in all the wrong ways.

Suppose one is attempting to personally validate (ie get personal audience) with the president. Empirical analysis of the problem would simply suggest all one requires is access to a specific building and have the ability to to open maybe 15 doors.

Do you think that is a reasonable manner to analyze the problem or do you think that because of the nature of the president there are unique problems (and hence solutions) outside of merely what one does with one's mind and senses?

Perhaps I didn't explain my self clearly.

My point is that whatever data you are calling upon to necessarily rule out god (or relegate all accounts of his existence to imagination) cannot be validated so whatever is backing up your stance is certainly not issues of mere validation.

Your still none the clearer in explaining why communication of knowledge/experience in one instance must be relegated to imagination in one case and not the otehr.

So IOW its simply that you are prepared to trust the statements of authority of one field (and not another) - hence ideological bias
:shrug:

by and large, not a lot

 

Lightgigantic, I appreciate the response you have given. I don't feel the need to go any further in our discourse since it seems we understand each other's position pretty well, yet it seems you just can't accept my view, likewise I yours. I believe much differently than you do. I'll just leave it there. Best Regards

 

Is that what they call automatic writing, or do I just need to go get a beer?
Yeah hang on....ahh...*brrp* that's better.
Johnny Cash, eh? I wouldn't know, I wasn't country when country wasn't cool.
I take it back. He got down on Nashville Skyline. About 2 octaves down.

All of this is about as far from wynn's diatribe about scrupulosity, as you can get.

BTW some of that fast talking big eyeballs stuff sounded like a speed freak.

144,000 sounds pretty sci-fi. Will tachyons be involved?
Angelic generation cycle is so sci-fi/3D/without the glasses.
White eyeballs is a metaphor for the zombies who head for the teleporters?
That was always the hardest part of religion for me - too much symbolism
Thanks for breaking it down though.
I for one will definitely sleep better tonight.

Oh, speaking of the Zombies, here's an almost Zombie-like correlation to your apocalyptic subtext, some countercoutre anti-something-or-other, to mollify Johnny Cash (God rest his soul), and get us all in sync with your chilling message:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E07FVImK8Ps

 

We are not allowed to hate what color other people are so we might as well find something new to gang up on some on for, right?

 

The principle of cause and effect may be obvious and mundane enough as such; but how it works out in particular cases is often anything but obvious.

We generally have to take scientific findings on faith, because a scientific study usually involves too many factors for the average lay to comprehend or test themselves.
Many scientific studies are so elaborate that none of the participant researches knows the whole scope of the study.

People generally believe in things without having proof of them.

See John Hardwig's Epistemic dependence.

Setting up a double bind is not reasonable.
Double binds are listed as logical fallacies.

Why would that be the case?

As long as humans are subject to birth, aging, illness and death, and as long as there is a scarcity of resources on planet Earth, the issue of "Why be good? Why be moral?" remains.

Morality doesn't have to do with the fear of God, but it has to do with the distribution of resources and with how people deal with the problems that come with birth, aging, illness and death.

 

I can't read PDF documents very much because they don't respond to my monitor display setting of white text on black screen, to help prevent eyestrain.

It's different for me, I suppose. I can't say for a lot of other people. Maybe my mind is more scientific. I can analyze physical things in our universe differently than theological abstracts. So when someone says they take it on faith that their carburetor needs to be rebuilt, I can find information on them that I don't already know and based on my accumulated and repeatably verified knowledge of how mechanical things work, I can picture how the actual carburetor could be malfunctioning.

Anything that I can't do that analysis for, I don't really form much if any belief on, unless like, say, something I am seeing actually tested is involved. For example, with an antibiotic, I don't imagine that it has cured me before I start to take it, I just give it a try and hope it does. If it does work, then I have faith it it, you might say; then I believe it is able to work. I am still skeptical of its ability to some extent, though.

If I can't do those types of testing, whether simulated based on experience, or through actual observation, I don't really form a belief. I just don't think about it that much. Maybe he should have given the example of a bridge, a much more critically engineered thing. He still might have overlooked that civilization has evolved these things over time, adding to the knowledge on how to make them right. So the faith has actual physical objects to be based on, not mere speculation.

I'm not going to go into this since I wasn't the one to bring it up.

I'd like to see the focus of education by parents and schools to move more to building society to eliminate the hardships of life, providing both the ethical reasons why and the living spaces and cities. Not easy to do, but it would be civil progress.

 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120104134815.htm

Allow me to go with this example. I just read this article on LCA, Lithocholic acid. Some of the thoughts going through my mind include that it sounds pretty cool--a little belief or faith there, yeah. Then I realize that it is long way from the lab to medicine. I also realize that anyone I know probably won't benefit from it. Two reducers of belief, there. It probably won't touch my life any more than the 1000s of other discoveries that I don't consciously experience in real life and therefore don't have a belief in.

Basically it has to be real to me to believe. If I happened to be a Harry Potter fan, I still wouldn't believe in him, to go in another direction with another example that I will throw in there because I thought of it earlier.

 

I was never a big fan of the Hollies if that's what you mean.

No we definitely don't judge by color, but it took an oppressed man to remind us that we judge by the content of one's character.

What character wants to bury the evidence of the fossil record and propagate lies, and why is that crowd historically linked to racism in the US?

Can you imagine this man advocating for truth in the schools when he was controlling the entrances?

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Is this the kind of hatred you were referring to?

 

That's too bad.

To refuse to read pdf's in this time and age is ... not particularly scientific.

You set up a double bind for yourself. :shrug: