The Bible: True, False, Or Irrelevant?

dr wu

Noble
I absolutely agree, however he describes what he describes. It is not hard to make the 20th century connection using only his description. I have no idea what an F18 with an afterburner or a modern day SpaceX type rocket wuld be doing there.

I agree that to some extent you can read Aliens into the bible, but most places it would be pretty darn obscure. His description is more specific in this passage than any others I can remember finding in the bible.
You cant see any similarities in his description?, even using just the literal translation?
I mean he describes apposing folding wings, a transparent dome with a chair under it. Wheels within wheels.
You didn't think this passage stands out a lot more than any other, at least that I have seen.
The Ezekiel passages are probably the most intriguing regarding aliens in the Bible if one looks at them in the theme of space craft.....I agree, but to me it's still just interpretation and I can easily see where they are just dreams and visions.
 

dr wu

Noble
Just got back from tea at the pub. Been thinking. Isn't it interesting how people can interpret things so differently. To me, Ezekiel vision is as clear as Wu, ambiguity. And I consider myself a skepti bunker who believes we are being visited :) just maybe 1% not 99% loll. To quote Spock...fascinating :)
Skeptics by definition are skeptical so you should be skeptical of the alien Bible claims....and not very accepting of that.
I accept the possibility but the evidence is not good at all...it's speculation and interpretation.
There are many other visions and dreams that are weird in the Bible that don;t show evidence of aliens but of God and angels....why are those interpreted differently.?
BTW...there is a theory that ancient peoples were more prone to visions and hallucinations due to a theory called the Bicameral Mind. Many think that explains the speaking and seeing of God back then.
Bicameralism (psychology) - Wikipedia
 

nivek

As Above So Below
It's genuine in the sense that the various writers who wrote it were believers and were honoring those beliefs about their religious leaders.

We have this now, believers in all sorts of things and writing books and lectures about their beliefs and making videos of it online, this scenario is alive and rampant in the world, especially on the internet...Do you think this alone makes the bible genuine?...

First we must recognize that it's a collection of 'books' written over centuries by multiple authors during their various time eras.

Even the religious leaders teach this, moving on...

As such there are many different points of view covering many different events. It wasn't collected until the Roman Catholic Church decided to create a 'Bible'....so the whole thing about it as one complete work representing Christianity is inaccurate to begin with.

I haven't seen any theory of the bible being one complete work, could you post a link of this?...

I don't believe that miracles happened like told in the Bible.

I also don't think miracles happened as written in the various books of the bible, I think many of the stories were twisted from more ancient stories written in sanskrit...

IMO they are stories meant to show faith and religious fervor which are meant to illustrate this to the faithful and even recruit others.

This is a good possibility or taken from older sources and rewritten to make these teaching stories...Sufi teaching uses many stories which are exaggerated and colourful for the intention of making an impression or instilling thought...Sufi stories abound of feats of miracles sometimes written to teach...

It's possible some might have been natural events that were taken to be signs from God...

Here's where the clouds form so to speak, which god, whose god, maybe the thunder was for the Islamic god not the Christian one but no one told the Christians so they blamed themselves, or maybe Shiva was causing a ruckus pissed off at some Hindus but the Jews hear the thunder and think Yahweh is angry at them?...

So everyone blaming themselves for pissing off their respective gods when a violent storm passes through the region, writes it in a book, calls it holy and a lesson learned before deciding to find a way to go to war with their neighbors...

I do believe that many of the locales and some events mentioned as in battles ,etc are probably as accurate as people could write about in those days. So I don't think all of it is completely false by any means .

I agree, the past has shown a remarkable skill at record keeping, I think many of the events and people were real accounts mixed in with hearsay or storytelling...

There are many lessons and parables ,etc...that still are relevant in this day and age. And parts are very well written prose with great tales.

I don't agree with this so much, take it for what it is, an old outdated book and put it aside...It has influenced the world pong enough, mankind needs to grow out of many old vices and habits...This book is one of the things humans need to let go of if we are going to advance into the future peacefully...

It's one of the worlds great pieces of literature and imho that;s how we should look at it....but not as literal truth.

We need to stop thinking this book came from a god and see it for what it is, an old book that's partially true and partially false...

Regarding the 'alien connection'...it's highly unlikely that that is the source of some of the events. I think that's wishful thinking by the alien crowd. But there are some very unusual tales in the Bible that make one think the original authors had wild imaginations.

This would be a good thread of its own...
 

dr wu

Noble
We have this now, believers in all sorts of things and writing books and lectures about their beliefs and making videos of it online, this scenario is alive and rampant in the world, especially on the internet...Do you think this alone makes the bible genuine?...



Even the religious leaders teach this, moving on...



I haven't seen any theory of the bible being one complete work, could you post a link of this?...



I also don't think miracles happened as written in the various books of the bible, I think many of the stories were twisted from more ancient stories written in sanskrit...



This is a good possibility or taken from older sources and rewritten to make these teaching stories...Sufi teaching uses many stories which are exaggerated and colourful for the intention of making an impression or instilling thought...Sufi stories abound of feats of miracles sometimes written to teach...



Here's where the clouds form so to speak, which god, whose god, maybe the thunder was for the Islamic god not the Christian one but no one told the Christians so they blamed themselves, or maybe Shiva was causing a ruckus pissed off at some Hindus but the Jews hear the thunder and think Yahweh is angry at them?...

So everyone blaming themselves for pissing off their respective gods when a violent storm passes through the region, writes it in a book, calls it holy and a lesson learned before deciding to find a way to go to war with their neighbors...



I agree, the past has shown a remarkable skill at record keeping, I think many of the events and people were real accounts mixed in with hearsay or storytelling...



I don't agree with this so much, take it for what it is, an old outdated book and put it aside...It has influenced the world pong enough, mankind needs to grow out of many old vices and habits...This book is one of the things humans need to let go of if we are going to advance into the future peacefully...



We need to stop thinking this book came from a god and see it for what it is, an old book that's partially true and partially false...



This would be a good thread of its own...

-I think it's a genuine religious artifact regarding the belief in it as are all other religious documents...not genuinely true in the sense of it being fact ,etc.
-You would be surprised at how many people are ignorant of the origins of the Bible regarding it's time frame and how it was assembled.
-Scholars, researchers ,etc do not think it was 'one complete work' .. but many Christians especially fundamentalists believe in this divine chain of inspiration from God to man leading to the whole book which they believe was the intention from the get go. They also believe that God made sure no errors were made ,etc..That was what I was referring to.
-Several ancient sources have been postulated as influencing the Old Testament including the Epic Of Gilgamesh and some Sumerian writings.
-I'm not sure what you are referring to about clouds and thunder .etc (if you mean they were scared of nature....I'm sure that played a part).....the Jews had multiple deities when in Ur and Mesopotamia and then after migration adopted a single one in Yahweh (who they became loyal to after Moses went to get the 10 commandments) who predates Allah the Islamic God (Arabs did have deities before as Bedouins when they roamed the desert). Hindu deities were multiple also and not monotheistic but are also very old. No Jews were in areas where Hindus lived in those days...as far as I know and Hindus did not travel very far west .
-Again it's a remarkable piece of ancient literature and should be looked at in that manner. It documents the beliefs of some of our ancestors and as such still influences many today...especially the New Testament which is extremely important to western ideology and Christian evangelasists and fundamentalists who play a large part these days in western politics in the US.
 

Dundee

Fading day by day.
With all that has been said, why is it even relevant. If scholars know that it was written over a long period of time, largely by fundamentalists, tainted and corrupted by the church, and interpreted by each group as they please.
Why then is so much emphasis put on its content. Isn't the elephant in the room that as a reference as to the supposed word and intent of god, that it is useless. There are some pretty darn clever folks out there that believe in god and study the bible. Do they just ignore all this? I have never understood this aspect of religious folks.
 

cobalt

Honorable
With all that has been said, why is it even relevant. If scholars know that it was written over a long period of time, largely by fundamentalists, tainted and corrupted by the church, and interpreted by each group as they please.
Why then is so much emphasis put on its content. Isn't the elephant in the room that as a reference as to the supposed word and intent of god, that it is useless. There are some pretty darn clever folks out there that believe in god and study the bible. Do they just ignore all this? I have never understood this aspect of religious folks.
Create your own religion.
 

Athena ashford

Honorable
I read the book the da Vinci code ,by dan brown ,it a very interesting piece of work based on the holy grail and bible where he speculated that christ was a mere human was later given the title of god ,and the Bible hid the fact that christ was married to show him pure ,They even made his mother a virgin this shows how desperate the church was to show his godliness.
 

dr wu

Noble
With all that has been said, why is it even relevant. If scholars know that it was written over a long period of time, largely by fundamentalists, tainted and corrupted by the church, and interpreted by each group as they please.
Why then is so much emphasis put on its content. Isn't the elephant in the room that as a reference as to the supposed word and intent of god, that it is useless. There are some pretty darn clever folks out there that believe in god and study the bible. Do they just ignore all this? I have never understood this aspect of religious folks.
All good questions.....it is relevant as a valuable historical work just like any other that documents how we lived and thought in the distant past. Is it relevant as a religious template?....-only to those who believe in it which is still a large number of people btw....especially in the US.
You are right in that many very smart people in the past and currently still 'believe' in it.....it is very interesting how someone can separate the two seemingly contradictory world models. I think that the first video I posted the scholar from Exeter in England mentions that.
 

dr wu

Noble
I read the book the da Vinci code ,by dan brown ,it a very interesting piece of work based on the holy grail and bible where he speculated that christ was a mere human was later given the title of god ,and the Bible hid the fact that christ was married to show him pure ,They even made his mother a virgin this shows how desperate the church was to show his godliness.
Remember......The Da Vince Code is a work of fiction. But it is true that this idea has been promoted in the past and was first postulated in modern times in the book Holy Blood Holy Grail. They theorized he was married and even had a child and that the Holy Grail was Jesus bloodline, etc. He was looked at as Jewish Rabbi by many and they were encouraged to be married back in those days. While there is no clear evidence it is a possibility.
Others believe he was a member of the Essenes, a hermetic group of Jewish mystics. As such he wandered and preached in that area....as did John The Baptist who allegedly baptized Jesus once.
The Virgin birth aspect wasn't an act of 'desperation'....but an act of religious fulfillment because it was said in the OT that a son of God born of a virgin (from the line of David..) would come to set the Jews 'free'.(I'm paraphrasing here..) so the followers of Christ naturally believed he was the one prophesized about in the Old Testament books.,,,btw there was no formal OT then just a collection of sacred Jewish books that they read and more or less believed in.
 

ImmortalLegend527

The Messenger Of All Gods old and new
All of the western world is based on Biblical influences due to the spread of Christianity over the millennia.
So how much of the Bible is accurate...any, some ,or very little? Do you even care..?
Very interesting video that I found on another forum.....a young Biblical scholar who happens to be an atheist but she is really into the Bible....on a de-constructive level. Much of her ideas I have read before since I have followed the interpretations of the Bible over the last 40 years with others like Ehrman, Pagels, Dawkins, Harris etc..
I Believe every word of the bible but it just was not written on this planet and everybody in the bible was the same person.
 

Visenya

Honorable
I read the book the da Vinci code ,by dan brown ,it a very interesting piece of work based on the holy grail and bible where he speculated that christ was a mere human was later given the title of god ,and the Bible hid the fact that christ was married to show him pure ,They even made his mother a virgin this shows how desperate the church was to show his godliness.

Yep, I think this.
 

August

Metanoia
I was told by someone ,in no uncertain terms mind you , that a ' talking snake' was quite possible if God wanted one to talk. If memory serves me correctly it was the 'talking snake' that tempted Eve so it was supposedly the Devil at work here not God . Although one may argue that God controls everything including the Devil so I guess that makes that a Moot point.

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