You can't have it both ways. Either it is all true, or it is not all true. If it partially or somewhat true then no one can tell which is which.
It disheartens me when I hear very intelligent people thinking like fundamentalists and assuming that all the religious people in the world think the same way.
Imagine if David of biblical times was given another vision: "Yea, and the peoples did ride in the bellies of roaring monsters all to one great place where they were disgorged upon the ground. And though the meeting place was walled around, at their approach God did open the walls to them and, verily, the did enter without effort. A great stair appeared before them, and as they stood upon it God lifted them so they climbed towards Heaven without effort."
This, as you may have guessed, is a description from David's point of view if he was shown a bunch of people arriving in their cars at the shopping mall and using the automatic doors to walk in and then taking the escalator up to Sears. Does the fact that he didn't understand everything he saw mean that he didn't see it?
The bible was not written by God, as some people claim. Nor was it purely an invention of man. It was written by man with divine inspiration. It tells us stories of things that happened, but the narrators were not omniscient. An incredible deluge wiping out an amazing amount of land really did happen. And to anybody shown it, it would have seemed to have happened to the whole world. And so stories were told about it. And the stories with the most worthy lessons were retold and one eventually became the story of Noah and his ark. The fact that the entire world wasn't flooded and that his ark couldn't have fit all the animals doesn't negate the values in the story. The only way to negate the lessons shown in the story would be to take the entire thing as literal: If you assume that it is a literal accounting of the exact happenings of the time, then you are no longer obligated to examine the story for any meanings it might actually have. It's just a history book at that point.
If it partially or somewhat true then no one can tell which is which.
Then it is your contention that the whole shebang should be thrown out because we don't have the intellectual wherewithal to ferret out the truths, be they couched in parable or literal account? Remind me to keep my baby out of your bathwater, Dan.
But I am somewhat puzzled by your statement about Exodus. The Old Testament clearly identifies the murders as being directly at the hand of the deity.
Indeed. I was thinking of King Herod's slaughtering of all the children in Matthew 2:16-18.
In Exodus, we are told of a tyrannical ruler keeping a race of people as slaves and refusing to let them be free even under terrible threat. As punishment for his acts and as a sign of God's greatness, the first borns in his country (and only those under his rule) were killed. As a result, a people were liberated and celebrate it as a great day even now thousands of years later. George W. Bush has killed more people, and less discriminantly, and he's just a man with an ego problem - not a deity with a people to rescue. (Although that's exactly what GWB wishes he was.)
As for Penicillin, I thought you meant that when it was discovered somebody hid it away for some time. I hadn't heard about anything like that, but wasn't going to question it since I knew nothing of it. But now, if I understand correctly, you're saying God should have given the secrets of penicillin to the first people ever to be sick so that it would be with us for all time. There's so much wrong with that, I don't even know where to begin. He gave us a whole universe to discover. If all the beneficial parts are handed to us on a silver platter, then what's the point of exploration and learning? And let's say it WAS given to us thousands of years ago: All the things that are affected by antibiotics would have adapted and made it useless within a century and then we'd be REALLY screwed because it would just be another Bible story about a miraculous substance that seemingly doesn't exist anymore and we'd have no way to discover it now since it would no longer be effective even if we did rediscover it, so we'd never learn how to make new antibiotics at all. It's miraculous, to me, that it was discovered with such a perfect timing that we had just enough technology to be able to make new antibiotics to treat an even wider spectrum of illnesses and to be able to keep up with the adaptations of the bacteria they are effective against.
It sounds to me, Dan, like you are less of an atheist and more of a person so mad at God that he can't accept that He even exists. Your reasons for rejecting God boil down to this: He has done things you disagree with and hasn't done things you wish he had. So, he doesn't exist.
I have a strange curse upon me: Every new car I have ever bought has gotten in an accident (usually super-minor paint scratchers) within a week of me buying it. It's incredibly frustrating. I can't convey the level of frustration - it's astonishingly, amazingly, and all other superlatives-ly frustrating. Well, the one I had two cars ago got rearended as I was less than block from the delaership. There I was, stopped at a red light when some doofus rammed into the back of it at about 30 miles an hour doing some real, serious damage.
I got pissed. Oh boy, was I pissed. I very rarely lose my temper - I'm an incredibly laid back guy and very few people have ever seen me angry. But this guy was freaking out because I was so pissed. I was screaming at the top of my lungs, "You f***ing a*****le" and every obscenity I could think of. The guy came up to my window, thinking I was going to kill him, and said, "Dude, calm down a little." My response was to turn to him and tell him, "Shut up! I'm not talking to you! I'm yelling at God!" Oh yeah: Pissed at God and tellin' him so.
I got it out of my system and then calmly exchanged insurance info with the guy (who probably thought I was completely whacko) and we went our separate ways.
Maybe God has it out for my new cars and maybe I'm just incredibly unlucky with them. Regardless, the point is that it's okay to be mad at him. I'm sure (especially when you were a teenager) that you got mad at your parents, and you probably let them know it. It doesn't negate the fact that they are your parents. While you may not have agreed with their decisions and acts, they did them out of love for you.
Reject God on a scientific basis if you believe he cannot exist. Don't reject him just because you'd be mad at him if he can.
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