Does the Bible Wheel prove the Bible is God's Word?

[Gambini]

"The answer simply cannot be anything relating to traditional Christian theology because that is false on all levels"

Hahaha ... Richard, are you for real? I'm sorry if this sounds rude but that is just plain stupid. How many times do I have to tell you ... IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR PERSONAL OPINION IS OF VARIOUS PASSAGES IN THE BIBLE! If the Christian bible contains information that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up ITS OWN CLAIM that it is inspired by the Christian God (hence, the Christian God exists). And you have the balls to claim that all kinds of religions have this kind of evidence? REALLY???

Let me put it in a syllogism for you ...

Premise 1) The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 2) If the Christian bible contains information that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up the claim being made under premise 1.
Premise 3) The Christian bible DOES contain information that could never have been produced by man.
THEREFORE, the Christian God EXISTS!

I DEFY YOU TO REFUTE THIS ARGUMENT. Bringing up biblical passages that you personally feel are contradictions or morally questionable is nothing but a red herring. The passages you personally feel are actual contradictions could potentially be just APPARENT contradictions. The passages you personally feel are unscientific could potentially be meant to be taken as metaphorical or poetic. The passages you personally feel are morally questionable only means you personally think the biblical God WHO ACTUALLY EXISTS (per the syllogism I just gave you) is an asshole. My response to that would be SO WHAT??? Nobody cares what your personal opinion is of the moral character of the Christian God. AGAIN, please refute the argument I just spelled out for you, Richard. I DARE YOU.

"There is no God that answers prayers"

How do you know??? And whatever happened to your claim that you don't actually believe God doesn't exist (you just "lack a belief", right?)?

Btw, I didn't forget about your last reply to me. I'll respond to it when I get a chance. I admit that I can get really lazy when it comes to long replies. I prefer shorter replies (especially because I think longer replies are less likely to even be read).

The Nazarene ... He is God.

[Richard Amiel McGough]

"The answer simply cannot be anything relating to traditional Christian theology because that is false on all levels"

Hahaha ... Richard, are you for real? I'm sorry if this sounds rude but that is just plain stupid. How many times do I have to tell you ... IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR PERSONAL OPINION IS OF VARIOUS PASSAGES IN THE BIBLE! If the Christian bible contains information that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up ITS OWN CLAIM that it is inspired by the Christian God (hence, the Christian God exists). And you have the balls to claim that all kinds of religions have this kind of evidence? REALLY???

Let me put it in a syllogism for you ...

Premise 1) The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 2) If the Christian bible contains information that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up the claim being made under premise 1.
Premise 3) The Christian bible DOES contain information that could never have been produced by man.
THEREFORE, the Christian God EXISTS!

I DEFY YOU TO REFUTE THIS ARGUMENT.

Hey there Gambini, :yo:

It's always fun when you do a drive by shooting. It would be better if you would also answer my refutations where I expose you errors (such as this one (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?3581-Was-the-Exodus-natural-or-supernatural-fact-or-fiction&p=52346#post52346)).

You DEFY me to REFUTE THIS ARGUMENT? :lmbo: OK! Here we go!

Premise 1 is false. There is no such thing as "the" Christian Bible. There are a number of books that Christians claim to be "the Bible." They contain different sets of books, and there is nothing in the text of any of them that says which books are supposed to be included. In other words, there is no "Christian Bible" that defines itself, so it is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for "the" Christian Bible to even refer to itself, let alone declare that it is "the Word of God."

Premise 2 is false. The fact that a book may contain information not consciously produced by the humans who put it together does not prove anything about Premise 1. And since premise 1 is logically incoherent (since "the" Bible does not refer to itself) it is impossible for any fact to support it. And by the way, this should not have been stated as an additional premise since it is merely an attempt to support Premise 1.

THEREFORE, your conclusion that "God EXISTS" does not follow from your premises.

Man, that was easy! :hysterical:



Bringing up biblical passages that you personally feel are contradictions or morally questionable is nothing but a red herring. The passages you personally feel are actual contradictions could potentially be just APPARENT contradictions. The passages you personally feel are unscientific could potentially be meant to be taken as metaphorical or poetic.

Dude, you need to learn the meaning of "red herring." It has nothing to do with presenting evidence supporting my argument. My argument is that the Bible contains real contradictions and real moral abominations attributed to God. In order to present this argument, I need to present the evidence supporting it. That's all I have done. It is not a red herring.

Your assertion that they are "just APPARENT contradictions" is just that - an assertion.

And since you provided no evidence supporting your assertion, it is a baseless assertion.

And since it appears to directly contradict that facts it looks to me like a delusional baseless assertion. Let me explain: I've read all the major apologists and have never seen one that successfully proved all the contradictions are merely "apparent." And worse, their arguments tend to be filled with gross errors and logical fallacy throughout. It's so bad that I have concluded that Christian apologetics is an abyss of absurdity. I do not know of one Christian apologist with intellectual integrity who would assert that the Bible is error free. Not one. If you want to see how Biblical fundamentalism destroys the mind, take a look at these three articles from my blog:

The Art of Rationalization: A Case Study of Christian Apologist Rich Deem (http://www.biblewheel.com/blog/index.php/2012/10/06/the-art-of-rationalization-a-case-study-of-christian-apologist-rich-deem/)

Two Thousand Reasons to Believe Hugh Ross Might Not be Entirely Credible (http://www.biblewheel.com/blog/index.php/2013/03/29/2000-reasons-to-believe-hugh-ross-might-be-wrong/)

Why Most Animals are Not Philosophers: Fatal Flaws in Dr. Craig's Moral Argument for God (http://www.biblewheel.com/blog/index.php/2013/01/18/why-animals-are-not-moral-agents-fatal-flaws-in-dr-craigs-moral-argument-for-god/)

I DEFY YOU TO REFUTE THOSE ARTICLES! :lmbo:

Your suggestion that unscientific verses "could potentially be meant to be taken as metaphorical or poetic" is true in many cases. Those passages present no problem. They are not the ones I was talking about. But there is a great irony in your comment since many fundamentalists assert that obviously poetic passages like "stretching out the heavens" actually refer to modern relativistic cosmology! Doh! :doh:



The passages you personally feel are morally questionable only means you personally think the biblical God WHO ACTUALLY EXISTS (per the syllogism I just gave you) is an asshole. My response to that would be SO WHAT??? Nobody cares what your personal opinion is of the moral character of the Christian God.

Your suggesting that my opposition to GENOCIDE is "just my personal feeling" shows how Christianity destroys the normal sense of morality in people.

It is the BIBLE that presents God as an "asshole" (to use your colorful language). It has nothing to do with any moral judgments unique to me. My argument is based on the OBJECTIVE MORALITY that is shared by all rational healthy humans. Things like ... oh, I don't know ... GENOCIDE IS IMMORAL! Killing everyone except 32,000 sexy virgins that were then distributed to the very soldiers that slaughtered every person they ever loved is IMMORAL. The killing of every person in Jabesh Gilead other than 400 sexy virgins to supply wives to the 600 soldiers remaining after the slaughter of all the other men, women, and children of the tribe of Benjamin is not only immoral but INSANE. Inflicting a famine on Israel for THREE YEARS because of the sins of the previous king Saul is just nuts. And not telling them for three years is irrational. And then not lifting the famine until seven sons of Saul were murdered is totally immoral. What parent would treat their children that way? What king would rule his country that way? Your "holy book" attributes gross immorality and irrationality to Yahweh. No amount of sophistry will ever hide this fact.



AGAIN, please refute the argument I just spelled out for you, Richard. I DARE YOU.

Already done. In spades. See above. Your fallacies were so ridiculous it took about three minutes to type the answer off the top of my head.


"There is no God that answers prayers"

How do you know??? And whatever happened to your claim that you don't actually believe God doesn't exist (you just "lack a belief", right?)?

There are few facts known with greater certainty than that God is not trustworthy. No person on the planet can actually TRUST that he will actually DO anything on their behalf. If God were only half as trustworthy as the average dentist there would be no doubt about his existence.

You misunderstood my post (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?3581-Was-the-Exodus-natural-or-supernatural-fact-or-fiction&p=52469#post52469) about "lack of belief" (which is understandable since you didn't even respond to it). It is impossible to prove that no God of any kind exists. And the term "God" is too broad to know what kind of evidence its existence would imply. But we don't have that problem with the God of the Bible. The Bible makes many specific statements about its God. Most significantly, it asserts that God is TRUSTWORTHY. Therefore, we have a way to test to see if that God exists. We simply look at the lives of believers and see if there is even ONE BELIEVER for whom God has proven trustworthy. The answer is obviously "no." There is not one person that can actually TRUST God to actually DO anything in any given situation. Therefore, we have exceedingly strong evidence that the Christian God does not exist because we have made literally BILLIONS of observations that confirm that God cannot actually be TRUSTED to actually DO anything. This directly contradicts the uniform biblical assertion that God is trustworthy, and so we a very strong reason to reject the hypothesis that "the God of the Bible exists."


Btw, I didn't forget about your last reply to me. I'll respond to it when I get a chance. I admit that I can get really lazy when it comes to long replies. I prefer shorter replies (especially because I think longer replies are less likely to even be read).

I'm glad you noticed that. It would be great if you answered that post.

I totally agree about short replies. But to accomplish that, you need to narrow down your assertions to one or two points at a time. Just enough to make your point, and I will try to do the same.


The Nazarene ... He is God.

That's funny. It took about four centuries for the early Christians to come to agreement about that, and that only happened after the dissenters were forced to comply with the new "orthodoxy." And the debate continues to this day. There are folks who agree absolutely with you that the Bible is the Word of God but who disagree absolutely that Jesus was God. Equally sincere and informed believers can't even agree about the answer to the most fundamental question "Was Jesus God?" And there are a thousand other points that equally sincere believers have never been able to agree about. I take this is good evidence that the Bible is logically incoherent. And this conclusion is strongly supported by the ridiculous arguments that Christians must make when they try to prove it is coherent.

I'm really glad you stopped by.

All the best,

Richard

[Gambini]

"Premise 1 is false.[/B] There is no such thing as "the" Christian Bible"

OF COURSE THERE IS A CHRISTIAN BIBLE, RICHARD! The BIBLE WHEEL, which was discovered by some guy named Rich, DEMONSTRATES that THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE of 66 books (Genesis to Revelation) IS a unified canon. So you FAILED miserably to refute premise 1. Lets see how you did with premise 2 ...

"The fact that a book may contain information not consciously produced by the humans who put it together does not prove anything about Premise 1"

OF COURSE IT DOES, RICHARD! The Christian bible flat out CLAIMS that it was inspired by the Christian God! So if the Christian bible contains evidence of a nonhuman intelligence, then obviously THAT backs up ITS OWN CLAIM that it was inspired by the Christian God. All throughout the New Testament, we have virtually the entire Old Testament being treated as divinely inspired scripture AND we even have New Testament books calling OTHER New Testament books divinely inspired scripture. So YES, the Christian bible IS a unified canon (demonstrated by the bible wheel) AND the Christian bible refers to itself over and over again as divinely inspired scripture. So you failed miserably AGAIN, good sir.

"Your conclusion that "God EXISTS" does not follow from your premises"

Fine ... I'll rephrase the argument ...

Premise 1) The Christian bible claims that it was inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 2) IF there is evidence of information in the Christian bible that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up ITS OWN CLAIM that it was inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 3) There is POWERFUL evidence of information in the Christian bible that could not have been produced by man.
Therefore, there is POWERFUL evidence that the Christian God EXISTS!

PWNED and FLATTENED!

"My argument is that the Bible contains real contradictions and real moral abominations attributed to God"

Again, SO WHAT??? That is COMPLETELY irrelevant as far as THIS syllogism is concerned (hence, RED HERRING). Please refute the argument I spelled out for you. You failed your first try. There is no reason for me to even correct your errors as they have absolutely no bearing on the argument being made.

"You misunderstood my post about "lack of belief" (which is understandable since you didn't even respond to it)"

I actually did respond to it two months ago. I wrote a long response and completely annihilated all of your main points using my smartphone (it must have took me two hours). Get this ... Right after I hit the send button, I was sent to a page telling me my time ran out. So when I hit the back button, my worse nightmare ... My message didn't get sent lol! And it was all gone. Man, I was furious. I think it has something to do with me not being signed on when I wrote the message. Next time I'll make sure I'm signed on. But I do want to respond to that post when I have the time because you failed on several of your main pontd (I'll explain when I get there).

"You need to narrow down your assertions to one or two points at a time. Just enough to make your point"

Fair enough. I'm going let all the other errors you made here slide for now for the sake of keeping it short and sweet. Lets put everything aside for now and DEAL WITH THE ARGUMENT I SPELLED OUT. And please don't give me the "well, it's just a paradox that I don't quite understand". THAT IS A COMPLETELY DODGING THE ARGUMENT! If the premises are true, which they are, then the conclusion logically follows. PERIOD. Game over.

Jesus is God (and you are NOT an atheist).

[Richard Amiel McGough]

"Premise 1 is false.[/B] There is no such thing as "the" Christian Bible"

OF COURSE THERE IS A CHRISTIAN BIBLE, RICHARD! The BIBLE WHEEL, which was discovered by some guy named Rich, DEMONSTRATES that THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE of 66 books (Genesis to Revelation) IS a unified canon. So you FAILED miserably to refute premise 1. Lets see how you did with premise 2 ...

You are changing your argument. You said nothing about the Bible Wheel in your Premise 1.

Your first premise was that "The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God." That is NOT TRUE. There is no verse in the Bible that says the Protestant Canon of 66 books was "inspired by the Christian God." There are only three possible verses that could be used to suggest that idea. The most popular is from Paul:
2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

Obviously, Paul could not have been thinking of the specific collection of 66 books since they had not all been written yet. But you could, of course, assert that God inspired Paul to write that verse with the intent that it should refer to the whole Protestant Bible when the canon was complete. But you don't know that is true. The context does not tell us. On the contrary, the context suggests that Paul was referring only to the OT canon. Therefore, you cannot "prove" anything by merely asserting your personal opinion about what the text means. Same goes for Christ's statement that "Scripture cannot be broken" and this passage from Revelation:
Revelation 22:18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19 And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.
Again, in its own context, this passage is talking about the book of Revelation. But again, you are free to assert that you think it is talking about the whole Bible. The fact that this passage is placed at the very end of the entire canon coheres nicely with that idea, but does not prove it. It's just your opinion.

Now does the Bible Wheel make your premise 1 true? Of course not. The Bible Wheel merely gives evidence of the unity of the 66 book canon. This supports your premise that there is a single Bible, but it does not prove that any verse in the Bible says the the Bible as a whole is inspired. That's your error.



"The fact that a book may contain information not consciously produced by the humans who put it together does not prove anything about Premise 1"

OF COURSE IT DOES, RICHARD! The Christian bible flat out CLAIMS that it was inspired by the Christian God! So if the Christian bible contains evidence of a nonhuman intelligence, then obviously THAT backs up ITS OWN CLAIM that it was inspired by the Christian God. All throughout the New Testament, we have virtually the entire Old Testament being treated as divinely inspired scripture AND we even have New Testament books calling OTHER New Testament books divinely inspired scripture. So YES, the Christian bible IS a unified canon (demonstrated by the bible wheel) AND the Christian bible refers to itself over and over again as divinely inspired scripture. So you failed miserably AGAIN, good sir.

Again, your assertion is false. There is no passage in any of the various Christian Bibles that says that there is such a thing as a "Bible" - let alone that it was inspired by God. At best, you can say that you believe this by faith based on the various things such as the three verses cited above and the Bible Wheel, but you cannot prove it. And even if the Bible Wheel proves a unity of the Bible, that does not imply that the god it proclaims is true. There are other possibilities that we are forced to consider. For example, the patterns could have been inspired by some lesser supernatural agents who hated God which is why they SLANDERED HIM by saying that he commanded moral abominations like genocide and the kidnapping of 32,000 virgins to be used as "wives." If you want your arguments to work, you need to open your mind to all the data and all the possibilities. If the God of the Bible were not presented as an irrational, cruel, moral monster I wouldn't have such problem believing the Bible.

Your assertion that "the Christian bible refers to itself over and over again as divinely inspired scripture" is simply not true. At best, it refers to the OT as "Scripture" and possibly Peter's one reference to Paul's writings. But it never even defines what the words "divinely inspired scripture" means or entails so you can't prove much about that. Christians have been debating this for millennia. Does it mean that God dictated each letter, each word, or just the basic idea? And if it is inspired, then why does it contain so many blatant errors? We could spend a lifetime discussing the meaning of inspiration and how it relates to what we actually see in the Bible. Your simple minded approach is entirely inadequate. I did not reject the Bible because of simple little problems that could adequately be fixed by merely waving your hands. I was convinced that the Bible Wheel proved the Bible, and the God of the Bible, for about 15 years. I did not change my mind lightly. I have thought deeply about these things, so only deep thought that seriously deals with the reality of what the Bible really says will sway me.


"Your conclusion that "God EXISTS" does not follow from your premises"

Fine ... I'll rephrase the argument ...

Premise 1) The Christian bible claims that it was inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 2) IF there is evidence of information in the Christian bible that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up ITS OWN CLAIM that it was inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 3) There is POWERFUL evidence of information in the Christian bible that could not have been produced by man.
Therefore, there is POWERFUL evidence that the Christian God EXISTS!

PWNED and FLATTENED!

Dude, get over yourself already. Your logic simply does not follow. And claiming victory when there is none makes you look stupid.

Premise 1 is still false, as shown above. The Christian Bible does not claim to be inspired by God. But even if it did, evidence of design would not prove that to be true because some other supernatural agents could have done it for their own reasons. Or it could have been the product of subconscious manifestation of archetypes. Or God could have designed the Bible with the intent of deliberately including CONTRADICTIONS to confound fundamentalists like you. He doesn't like folks to be so "high minded" as if they understood all the secrets of God, you know. You need to humble your soul, open your mind, and consider the broad range of possibilities.

Premise 2 is false. There are other possible explanations for the "information in the Christian bible that could not have been produced by man." This is a really important point. One of the things about the Bible Wheel is that it is not nearly as good as it could be. If I had written my own collection of 66 books, I could have designed it so that each Spoke had a hundred unique KeyLinks and I would have had absolutely indisputable proof that the whole thing was intelligently designed. But the Bible Wheel is no nearly that good. I still think it is "optimal" given the 66 books, but those 66 books could have been greatly improved. This then makes me think of evolution. Animals could have been much better designed if they had been designed rather than evolved, but they are pretty close to "optimal" given their evolutionary history. And so when I look at the history of the Bible, I see that there were dozens of various orders of the canon. This suggests that the Canon Wheel may have been the product of a scribal selection process.

Listen Gambini - it's really important that you take a moment to understand what is going on here. I have read the Bible, and I have concluded that the God it describes cannot be true. Therefore, we have a CONTRADICTION. On the one hand, there are amazing things in the Bible, both in the design of the whole, the design of individual passages, and even in the whole message from Genesis to Revelation. It has much commending it. But it also contains mountains of crap that I simply cannot believe. False cosmological mythology, blatant contradictions, errors, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to God. Merely asserting that it all must be "true" because the Bible is "inspired" does not solve any of these problems. I still cannot believe in the God described in its pages. So what is your solution?






Bringing up biblical passages that you personally feel are contradictions or morally questionable is nothing but a red herring. The passages you personally feel are actual contradictions could potentially be just APPARENT contradictions. The passages you personally feel are unscientific could potentially be meant to be taken as metaphorical or poetic.
Dude, you need to learn the meaning of "red herring." It has nothing to do with presenting evidence supporting my argument. My argument is that the Bible contains real contradictions and real moral abominations attributed to God. In order to present this argument, I need to present the evidence supporting it. That's all I have done. It is not a red herring.
"My argument is that the Bible contains real contradictions and real moral abominations attributed to God"

Again, SO WHAT??? That is COMPLETELY irrelevant as far as THIS syllogism is concerned (hence, RED HERRING). Please refute the argument I spelled out for you. You failed your first try. There is no reason for me to even correct your errors as they have absolutely no bearing on the argument being made.

It is not irrelevant and it is not a red herring. If the contradictions are real, then they defeat your argument. Therefore, they are not a red herring. They are a legitimate challenge to your argument.

If the contradictions are only "apparent" as suggest, then they do not really exist and you will have defended your argument. Therefore, we would need to determine if they are real or apparent.



"You misunderstood my post about "lack of belief" (which is understandable since you didn't even respond to it)"

I actually did respond to it two months ago. I wrote a long response and completely annihilated all of your main points using my smartphone (it must have took me two hours). Get this ... Right after I hit the send button, I was sent to a page telling me my time ran out. So when I hit the back button, my worse nightmare ... My message didn't get sent lol! And it was all gone. Man, I was furious. I think it has something to do with me not being signed on when I wrote the message. Next time I'll make sure I'm signed on. But I do want to respond to that post when I have the time because you failed on several of your main pontd (I'll explain when I get there).

I'm sorry to hear that. There is an "autosave function" that saves the draft of your post every 30 seconds. It's saved me a few times when my browser crashed.

And again, you really should refrain from your ridiculous claims such as having "annihilated all of my main points." It doesn't make you look smart.



"You need to narrow down your assertions to one or two points at a time. Just enough to make your point"

Fair enough. I'm going let all the other errors you made here slide for now for the sake of keeping it short and sweet. Lets put everything aside for now and DEAL WITH THE ARGUMENT I SPELLED OUT. And please don't give me the "well, it's just a paradox that I don't quite understand". THAT IS A COMPLETELY DODGING THE ARGUMENT! If the premises are true, which they are, then the conclusion logically follows. PERIOD. Game over.

Jesus is God (and you are NOT an atheist).
I have dealt with your argument. I agree that you may have sufficient reason (using Christian presumptions) to believe by faith that the Bible is inspired of God. But that is not strictly supported by the text, and the meaning of "inspired" is not even defined, so your argument is a TOTAL FAILURE.

Please think about the explanations I have given. There are many other possibilities. Your fundamentalist dogma about the Bible being inerrant very well could be BLASPHEMY if it turns out that you are SLANDERING GOD by attributing moral abominations, errors, and contradictions to him. If the God of the Bible is true, then it is most likely that he designed the Bible to expose the arrogance of the fundamentalists who claim to be speaking for him. You really need to think about these things very seriously. Any Christian who asserts the Bible has no errors is either deluded or deceptive. This demonstrates how fundamentalist religion tends to corrupt both the minds and the morals of believers. This is why I am so convinced that the fundamentalists are wrong. Their attitudes are fundamentally ANTI-TRUTH which, from a Christian perspective, is understood as ANTICHRIST.

All the best,

Richard

[Gambini]

"You said nothing about the Bible Wheel in your Premise 1"

Why would I have to mention it? I mean, you're the one who discovered the large scale structure of the 66 book canon. So I assumed you would grant that the 66 book canon is THE unified canon of the bible.

"The first premise was that "The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God." That is NOT TRUE. There is no verse in the Bible that says the Protestant Canon of 66 books was inspired by the Christian God"

WRONG, Richard! We know the 66 book canon is THE unified biblical canon (per the bible wheel discovery) and we KNOW that the entire Old Testament canon was treated by the New Testament writers as divinele inspired by the Christian God. Furthermore, Peter refers to the writings of Paul, which make up the MAJORITY of the New Testament canon, as SCRIPTURE (and all SCRIPTURE is divinely inspired by the Christian God according to Paul, REMEMBER?). So to sum up ...

1) The Christian bible is THE unified canon of the bible.
2) The unified canon of the bible refers to ITSELF as being divinely inspired by the Christian God.

"Now does the Bible Wheel make your premise 1 true? Of course not. The Bible Wheel merely gives evidence of the unity of the 66 book canon"

THAT'S ALL I NEED, RICHARD! THANK YOU!

"This supports your premise that there is a single Bible, but it does not prove that any verse in the Bible says the the Bible as a whole is inspired"

Yes, it DOES! Why? Because as I just pointed out, THE Christian bible refers to ITSELF as SCRIPTURE (ALL "scripture" is divinely inspired by the CHRISTIAN GOD, right?). The entire Old Testament canon is treated as divinely inspired scripture and even the New Testament refers to ITSELF as scripture.

"And even if the Bible Wheel proves a unity of the Bible, that does not imply that the god it proclaims is true. There are other possibilities that we are forced to consider. For example, the patterns could have been inspired by some lesser supernatural agents who hated God"

This is special pleading. The text ITSELF states that it was inspired by the Christian God. So evidence of a nonhuman origin BACKS UP THAT CLAIM. Period. I could literally dismiss any and everything by using your other "possibilities". Hell, maybe the earth is really being held up by an invisible chain of elephant trunks. The point is that you can't just dismiss the biblical evidence for a nonhuman origin by appealing to other "possibilities" when the text ITSELF is telling you who inspired it (the Christian God). And even if we played your imaginary game by theorizing that malignant forces inspired the biblical canon in order to slander God, why would God allow these malignant forces to perpetuate a "false" representation of him WITHOUT presenting an ACCURATE representation of him to rival the "false" representation of him? Furthermore, why would he allow the "false" representation of him to become the most read, bought and quoted book in all of history??? Your imaginary "explanation" doesn't work. And again, there's no reason to appeal to other explanations because the text TELLS YOU who inspired the bible. You obviously don't want the Christian God to exist because you dislike (hate?) how the bible portrays him. But that's on you. I have nothing to with that. That's between you and God. Just because you grant he exists doesn't mean you have to follow him (even the demons believe and tremble).

"Your assertion that "the Christian bible refers to itself over and over again as divinely inspired scripture" is simply not true"

OF COURSE IT'S TRUE, RICHARD! The New Testsment quotes the Old Testament all over the place as prophecy!

"It is not irrelevant and it is not a red herring. If the contradictions are real, then they defeat your argument"

No, they don't at all. Aside from the possibility that the alleged contradictions are really just apparent contradictions that serve to pull the reader into a deeper study of the text (which I'm sure you reject), they could EASILY be explained away as real contradictions that were inserted into the inspired text by man. You're still left with a unified canon (per the bible wheel) that contains information of a nonhuman origin AND that claims to be inspired by the Christian God. The moral objections you bring up (which I have problems with given an atheistic worldview but let that go) about genocide are easily explained, at least in my estimation, by the omniscience of the Christian God. That is ... It is literally impossible for an omniscient being to ever kill or order the killing of anyone wrongly because he foreknows all of our ultimate decisions and has the right to bring any of us to task for our decisions at any time. This is because ALL events (past, present and future) are present to an eternal being. And even if you don't buy this argument, so what? As far as the argument I spelled out for the evidence for the Christian God, raising moral objections means nothing. It's literally just saying "I think the Christian God, WHO EXISTS (per the syllogism I spelled out), is bad because he did such and such and he commanded such and such. That's why it's a red herring. The conclusion follows from the premises REGARDLESS of your moral objections.

The one who was formed in the dark ocean of the virgin womb of Mary is the same one who formed the world in the dark ocean of space ... He is God.

[Richard Amiel McGough]

"You said nothing about the Bible Wheel in your Premise 1"

Why would I have to mention it? I mean, you're the one who discovered the large scale structure of the 66 book canon. So I assumed you would grant that the 66 book canon is THE unified canon of the bible.

Good morning Gambini,

You would have had to mention it if you wanted to show that it supported your first premise. You did not do that and so you left a hole in your argument which I explained when I asked "Does the Bible Wheel make your premise 1 true?".



"The first premise was that "The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God." That is NOT TRUE. There is no verse in the Bible that says the Protestant Canon of 66 books was inspired by the Christian God"

WRONG, Richard! We know the 66 book canon is THE unified biblical canon (per the bible wheel discovery) and we KNOW that the entire Old Testament canon was treated by the New Testament writers as divinele inspired by the Christian God. Furthermore, Peter refers to the writings of Paul, which make up the MAJORITY of the New Testament canon, as SCRIPTURE (and all SCRIPTURE is divinely inspired by the Christian God according to Paul, REMEMBER?). So to sum up ...

1) The Christian bible is THE unified canon of the bible.
2) The unified canon of the bible refers to ITSELF as being divinely inspired by the Christian God.

First, you are just repeating your error that I already exposed. Paul was not talking about the NT when he said "all SCRIPTURE" because he didn't even know there was or would be an "NT." There is nothing in his writings that indicate he thought he was writing Scripture. He wrote LETTERS to believers encouraging them in the faith.

Second, your assumption that "that the entire Old Testament canon was treated by the New Testament writers as divinele inspired by the Christian God" is false. We don't know what books they thought were included in the OT. If we go by what the human authors believed, then we cannot assume that Paul was talking about the NT when he said "all scripture is inspired of God." This has been debated for 2000 years, and the two largest denominations (Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox) came to a different conclusion than the Protestants.

Third, who cares what the writers thought? They were obviously wrong about many things. They can't even agree with each other - just try to write a coherent account of the passion week and you will see what I mean. And they believed in false mythological cosmology, thought demons caused disease, expected Christ to return within their own lifetimes, and ten thousand other falsehoods. So simply appealing to their beliefs proves nothing, except that the Bible cannot be the "inerrant Word of God" no matter what kind of evidence (like the Bible Wheel) that shows a design. Given that it cannot be what you say it is (since that would lead to contradictions) we are forced to look for other explanations. That is not "special pleading" - it is basic logic.

Fourth, there is no such "god" as the "Christian God" - it took three hundred years to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, and it was enforced by VIOLENCE on an ignorant population. There are varieties of "God" presented in the Bible. Some, like you, say Jesus is God. The early Christians weren't comfortable with such a simple identification because it led to huge contradictions since there is only one God, and Jesus is not the Father. Or is he? Modern Oneness Pentecostalists, who believe the Bible is the truly "inerrant Word of God," disagree with you on this fundamental question. Ruling Christians declared that a modalist heresy. I think this is proof enough that the Bible is ambiguous at best and logically incoherent at worst.

The problem here is that you are trying a sledge-hammer approach to logic. When you overstate your case, you destroy it because any error invalidates a syllogism.

I think we would make a lot more progress if you quit asserting your opinions as if they were God's own truth. Just try to reason with me, beginning with facts that we both agree upon. That's the problem with your argument. You are basing it on presumptions that simply do not correspond to reality and on supposed implications that do not actually follow.

So let's work together to find a common foundation of agreement. Then, if the LOGIC AND FACTS actually support your contentions, I will be forced to agree.

Here is what I believe is true:

1) The Church as a whole has never agreed about the content of the OT canon, and it cannot be determined by merely reading the text. The arguments based on the text, such as "contradictions" between the deutero- and proto-canonical books cannot resolve the issue because contradictions can always be "explained away." And indeed, there are many "confirmations" between the deuters and the proto - e.g Wisdom of Sirach strongly coheres with Hebrews.

2) The Bible Wheel gives good evidence of a unity of the Protestant Canon that probably was not designed by the humans that put it together. From a Christian perspective, using CHRISTIAN PRESUPPOSITIONS, this gives strong evidence confirming the Bible as "God's Word." But it DOES NOT imply anything about the content being "true" in the sense that you would have it. At best, it is some sort of message from a higher intelligence, and that's why I cannot accept the ludicrous fundamentalist interpretations that falsely assert it is the "inerrant and infallible Word of God." That is simply false. It is an absolute impossibility as well as a gross absurdity based on simple-minded fallacious fundamentalist presuppositions. This is the same position I held when I was a Christian.

3) The Bible is filled with contrdictions, errors, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to God, so we cannot simply presume the text is true. If the Bible is God's Book, then we must respect it as such. The HIGHEST VIEW OF SCRIPTURE is to accept it exactly as it is given, which means that if it shows design, we accept that as coming from God's INFINITE INTELLIGENCE. Likewise, if it shows blatant contradictions, errors, and moral abominations attributed to God, we accept that also as coming from God's INFINITE INTELLIGENCE. The apologists who try to force the Bible to fit stupid little fundamentalist categories like "inerrant" are actually the primary enemies of God's Word. They make God look like a moron writing in crayon when they try to explain away the contradictions his infinite intelligence designed so well.

This is the great irony of Biblical fundamentalism. When fundamentalists think they are defending the Bible, they are actually making a mockery of their claim to believe GOD inspired it.


"Now does the Bible Wheel make your premise 1 true? Of course not. The Bible Wheel merely gives evidence of the unity of the 66 book canon"

THAT'S ALL I NEED, RICHARD! THANK YOU!

No, that is not all you need. The mere fact that the Protestant canon shows design does not prove that YOUR INTERPRETATION of the text is true! We agree that there is evidence of design, but we strongly disagree about what it means. And this brings us back to the perennial problem of interpretation. Think of all the believers that agree the Bible is the Word of God. Did that resolve their differences? No way. They come to radically different conclusions about fundamental questions like the divinity of Christ, the nature of salvation (Calvinist, Arminian, OSAS), etc., etc., etc. So you can't prove anything by merely proving the Bible was designed by a higher intelligence. You still must interpret what the text MEANS and merely believing the text is from God won't solve any of those problems of interpretation.



"This supports your premise that there is a single Bible, but it does not prove that any verse in the Bible says the the Bible as a whole is inspired"

Yes, it DOES! Why? Because as I just pointed out, THE Christian bible refers to ITSELF as SCRIPTURE (ALL "scripture" is divinely inspired by the CHRISTIAN GOD, right?). The entire Old Testament canon is treated as divinely inspired scripture and even the New Testament refers to ITSELF as scripture.

Wow - you are repeating that same error yet again! There is no reason to think that Paul knew nothing of any "NT" or that he thought he himself was writing Scripture when he said "All scripture is inspired by God." Suppose we asked him what he meant when he wrote that. I'm pretty sure he would have said he was talking about the existing Scriptures we know as the OT.

And again, it wouldn't matter if Paul was talking about the entire Protestant canon. The mere fact that the book says something does not mean it is true. Indeed, the question of "truth" makes no sense until we interpret the Bible, and when we do that we encounter many things that make it impossible for your simple conclusion that it is the "inerrant Word of God." Given what it says about God, I think it is logically IMPOSSIBLE to believe it is true. If your interpretation leads to contradictions we can be pretty sure it is not correct.


"And even if the Bible Wheel proves a unity of the Bible, that does not imply that the god it proclaims is true. There are other possibilities that we are forced to consider. For example, the patterns could have been inspired by some lesser supernatural agents who hated God"

This is special pleading. The text ITSELF states that it was inspired by the Christian God. So evidence of a nonhuman origin BACKS UP THAT CLAIM. Period. I could literally dismiss any and everything by using your other "possibilities". Hell, maybe the earth is really being held up by an invisible chain of elephant trunks. The point is that you can't just dismiss the biblical evidence for a nonhuman origin by appealing to other "possibilities" when the text ITSELF is telling you who inspired it (the Christian God). And even if we played your imaginary game by theorizing that malignant forces inspired the biblical canon in order to slander God, why would God allow these malignant forces to perpetuate a "false" representation of him WITHOUT presenting an ACCURATE representation of him to rival the "false" representation of him? Furthermore, why would he allow the "false" representation of him to become the most read, bought and quoted book in all of history??? Your imaginary "explanation" doesn't work. And again, there's no reason to appeal to other explanations because the text TELLS YOU who inspired the bible. You obviously don't want the Christian God to exist because you dislike (hate?) how the bible portrays him. But that's on you. I have nothing to with that. That's between you and God. Just because you grant he exists doesn't mean you have to follow him (even the demons believe and tremble).

This most certainly is not "special pleading." I get the impression you don't understand what that means. Here is the definiton:
Special pleading is a formal logical fallacy (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy) where a participant demands special considerations for a particular premise of theirs. Usually this is because in order for their argument to work, they need to provide some way to get out of a logical inconsistency - in a lot of cases, this will be the fact that their argument contradicts past arguments or actions. Therefore, they introduce a "special case" or an exception to their rules.
Special pleading is a kind of logical inconsistency, a failure to follow the same principles used in previous cases. That's not what I'm doing, and nothing you wrote suggests otherwise.

I am not making up random possibilities in an effort to "dismiss" anything. I am exploring those other possibilities because the one you suggest appears to be logically impossible. I am trying to UNDERSTAND what is really going on in the Bible. Your simplistic fundamentalism is obviously fallacious in my estimation. I reject it for the same reason I would reject 1 + 2 = 43. It is logically incoherent and so literally impossible for me to believe. This is what you need to address: your position appears to be logically incoherent. There's no need to shout. No need to fret. All you need to do is reason with me, beginning with main and plain things that are actually TRUE so we can build coherent arguments. If truth is on your side, then you will convince me or expose me as a fraud. This is the path we should be following.

And while we are speaking of making up "possibilities" in order to dismiss something that contradicts your beliefs - is that not what you do when you try to explain away all the obvious contradictions, errors, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to God? Now please think about this. A TRUE MIND could never be satisfied with any "explanation" that merely whitewashes the problems in the Bible. That is why I have such a low regard for Christian apologists. They have all prostituted their minds in service of the false doctrine that the Bible is the "inerrant Word of God." I can see the effect of this doctrine with my own eyes. It tends to corrupt both the minds and the morals of believers! It is, therefore, a most wicked doctrine (from a Christian perspective).

"why would God allow these malignant forces to perpetuate a "false" representation of him WITHOUT presenting an ACCURATE representation of him to rival the "false" representation of him?"

Now that's a good question! Why would God allow the Bible to present him as irrational, cruel, inconsistent, unjust, and ignorant of basic science? Good question! What does that tell us about the Bible? Answer that, and you will see why I cannot agree with your assumption that the Bible is the "inerrant Word of God." And again, you seem to forget that it doesn't matter if the Bible is the inerrant Word of God because we would still have all the problems, and no healthy mind would accept the ridiculous "explanations" that satisfy believers.

"You obviously don't want the Christian God to exist because you dislike (hate?) how the bible portrays him."

Not true. It's not that I don't "want to" but that I can't because it is a logical and intellectual impossibility. I delighted in my conception of God for over a decade. But then I began to see that I was not being honest with the Bible. I began to understand that Christians delude themselves and ignore what the Bible really says. I began to see that it was LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to believe in God as presented in the Bible. This is the issue you need to deal with.



"Your assertion that "the Christian bible refers to itself over and over again as divinely inspired scripture" is simply not true"

OF COURSE IT'S TRUE, RICHARD! The New Testsment quotes the Old Testament all over the place as prophecy!

You are equivocating over the term "Christian Bible." First you said that the CHRISTIAN BIBLE refers to ITSELF and then you said that the NT refers to the OT. To support your assertion you would have had to give evidence of the CHRISTIAN BIBLE referring to the CHRISTIAN BIBLE.

This is why it is so absurd for you to be trying your sledge-hammer logic strategy. You are not a sufficiently careful thinker. You equivocate over words that are essential to your argument and so your argument is trivial to refute. You should get down off your logic horse and try to reason with me by establishing a foundation of agreement. I am a very rational man, and I readily admit when I am wrong. Indeed, I am always thankful to folks who can show me where I have erred since only a fool would want to persist in known error. You see, I have nothing to lose, no dogmas to protect. I am a free thinking free man. I can admit the truth that the Bible Wheel appears to give strong evidence that "something supernatural" is going on in the bible. But on the other hand, perhaps all the criticism I received over the last ten years (primarily from Christians) was true and I am simply deluded, and the Bible wheel was nothing but a bunch of cherries specially picked to force fit a pattern to random data. I don't believe this, but I am seriously thinking about it. I have nothing to lose either way. It doesn't matter if the Bible Wheel is true - it still won't imply your interpretation of the Bible.



"It is not irrelevant and it is not a red herring. If the contradictions are real, then they defeat your argument"

No, they don't at all. Aside from the possibility that the alleged contradictions are really just apparent contradictions that serve to pull the reader into a deeper study of the text (which I'm sure you reject), they could EASILY be explained away as real contradictions that were inserted into the inspired text by man. You're still left with a unified canon (per the bible wheel) that contains information of a nonhuman origin AND that claims to be inspired by the Christian God. The moral objections you bring up (which I have problems with given an atheistic worldview but let that go) about genocide are easily explained, at least in my estimation, by the omniscience of the Christian God. That is ... It is literally impossible for an omniscient being to ever kill or order the killing of anyone wrongly because he foreknows all of our ultimate decisions and has the right to bring any of us to task for our decisions at any time. This is because ALL events (past, present and future) are present to an eternal being. And even if you don't buy this argument, so what? As far as the argument I spelled out for the evidence for the Christian God, raising moral objections means nothing. It's literally just saying "I think the Christian God, WHO EXISTS (per the syllogism I spelled out), is bad because he did such and such and he commanded such and such. That's why it's a red herring. The conclusion follows from the premises REGARDLESS of your moral objections.

No, they could not be "explained away as real contradictions that were inserted into the inspired text by man" since that would contradict your primary assumption that the Bible is the trustworthy Word of God. We would have to go through the text line by line to discern the truth from error.

And again, the fact that the Bible claims to be inspired by the "Christian God" is false. First, it never refers to itself as a whole. Second, there is no such thing as the "Christian God" - it took three hundred years to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity, and it was enforced by VIOLENCE on an ignorant population. If you want to form syllogism, you need to be more careful with your language. It must be absolutely precise or your argument will fail.

Your "easy explanation" of genocide strikes me as utterly absurd. We are not talking merely about the slaughter of innocent women and children - that's not the main point. The main point is the UTTER CORRUPTION that God inflicted upon his people by commanding them to be baby killers. The fact that you have no compassion nor sense of how very evil it would be to spend days chopping up babies while their mothers watched shows how religion tends to corrupt both the minds and the morals of believers. Your answer makes a utter MOCKERY of the Christian claim that morals are possible only with God. There is nothing more obviously immoral than chopping up babies! Yet you must justify blatant immorality to save your Bible. This is why I know with perfect certainty that my judgment is true. I can see the corruption wrought by your doctrine.

"And even if you don't buy this argument, so what?"

The "so what" is that it is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for your beliefs to be true.

"It's literally just saying "I think the Christian God, WHO EXISTS (per the syllogism I spelled out), is bad because he did such and such and he commanded such and such. That's why it's a red herring."

Wrong. There is no "Christian God" but only a collection of possible gods that can be inferred (using logic) from the text (as we know since different denominations derived different gods from the same text). Since all interpretation requires logic, and the text is quite ambiguous, and there are many "apparent" contradictions, it is absurd to speak so confidently of the "Christian God" or what he did or didn't intend by inspiring the text. And again, your entire conclusion means nothing because it doesn't matter if God inspired every letter of the Bible - you would still need to INTERPRET it. And that's what I've done. I can interpret the Bible as coming from the INFINITE INTELLIGENCE and so I cannot assume that INFINITE INTELLIGENCE is a freaking IDIOT! So don't try to sell me on idiot theories about the Bible being "inerrant." If the Bible is inspired, God has made that an impossibility.

Again, we see that the posts have become bloated because I had to correct so many errors in your argument. It would be best to simplify things. Begin with a foundation of agreement. Don't try to force you personal opinion by sledge-hammering a fallacious syllogism. I think we can make some real progress if you just try to reason with me.

Great chatting!

:sunny:

Richard

[Gambini]

Okay ... I'm going to try and keep the shouting to a minimum :P

"Paul was not talking about the NT when he said "all SCRIPTURE" because he didn't even know there was or would be an "NT." There is nothing in his writings that indicate he thought he was writing Scripture"

But Peter refers to Paul's writings as scripture. Hence, the NT does refer to itself as being inspired by the Christian God. Btw, I don't even necessarily need to use language like "the Christian Bible" anyways. If we can agree that the 66 book canon of the Bible entails a supernatural design, then that entire canon is a supernaturally designed book. And if the 66 book canon is a supernaturally designed book, then WHEREVER it claims to be an inspiration of the Christian God, that would apply to the ENTIRE canon (since the 66 book canon would be a supernaturally designed, unified canon). Does that make sense?

"We don't know what books they thought were included in the OT"

We know all the present OT books were seen as scripture. And it doesn't matter anyways because again, if there is a supernatural design in the 66 book canon, then that MEANS all the OT books in the 66 book canon obviously belong there.

"They were obviously wrong about many things"

We already went through this, Richard. IF there is a supernatural design in the 66 book canon, then "error" (at least on the part of the designer) isn't an option. The "error" must be in your own interpretation. The alleged "contradictions" could be just apparent contradictions (much like the apparent contradictions in nature itself, which serve to pull us into a deeper study of the natural world). The scientific "errors" could be seen as metaphorical or poetic language (a very common tool among the ancients). If there actually were examples of real "errors" in the 66 book canon, the logical conclusion would be those examples were inserted by fallible men. It certainly does absolutely nothing to explain away the supernatural evidence of the 66 book canon OR the fact that this supernaturally designed canon claims itself to be inspired by the Christian God. That's for sure.

"There is no such "god" as the Christian God"

Sure there is. The NT CLEARLY teaches that Jesus is God. It doesn't matter that there are various biblical interpretations. If God allowed man to come up with various false interpretations about the natural world, then why wouldn't he allow man to come up with various false interpretations about scripture??? He obviously DOES allow it. People are free to come up with all sorts of ideas about nature AND scripture.

"I think this is proof enough that the Bible is ambiguous"

The idea that the bible is ambiguous on the deity of Christ is absurd. And that's the point ... There are CLEARLY certain doctrines that the bible teaches (such as deity of Christ, the personhood of Satan, the existence of the angelic and demonic realm, life after death or the eternal separation of the righteous from the wicked) and yet you have self identifying Christians who reject these things. That has nothing to do with any ambiguity on the part of the biblical text. The fact of the matter is that the reason there are so many conflicting views on what the bible actually teaches is because people have a tendency to believe what they WANT to believe (which is why the bible ends with a warning to not take away from or add anything to scripture).

"I am not making up random possibilities in an effort to "dismiss" anything"

Richard, you are. If the supernaturally designed 66 book canon claims that it is inspired by the Christian God, then there is no reason to "explore" any other explanations (REGARDLESS of any potential "errors" you may feel is in the text)! The fact that there is supernatural design BACKS UP its own claim. My position is not "logically incoherent" at all. If you feel there are real "errors", then they were inserted by man. Simple. That does NOTHING to change the fact that there is powerful evidence of supernatural design in the bible and for the Christian God (since the bible clearly claims to be inspired by the Christian God).

"And while we are speaking of making up "possibilities" in order to dismiss something that contradicts your beliefs - is that not what you do when you try to explain away all the obvious contradictions, errors, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to God?"

No because I HAVE A REASON to do that whereas you do not. The reason I can assume the "errors", if they are real, were simply inserted by man is because there is powerful evidence of supernatural design in the bible. So it is only logical to conclude that. You, on the other hand, have no justification for "exploring" like the Frenchmen because the entire NT presents the Christian God as the one who inspired all of scripture. Hence, there is no reason to seek other "possibilities". The only reason to do that is if you have some kind of problem with the idea that the Christian God is real.

"Why would God allow the Bible to present him as irrational, cruel, inconsistent, unjust, and ignorant of basic science? Good question"

He doesn't. That's the point. Again, if the "errors" are real, then they were inserted by man. There is absolutely no problem at all with God allowing that because we have observable evidence everywhere we look of man manipulating and abusing nature (which God created, according to the biblical worldview). So if God would allow man to manipulate or abuse his creation to a limited degree, then what makes you think he wouldn't allow man to manipulate or abuse scripture to a limited degree? As long as the core message of the biblical worldview survives to pull on the hearts of men, then God's plan will eventually triumph in the end regardless.

"You see, I have nothing to lose, no dogmas to protect"

That's not true. You have EVERYTHING to lose. If the Christian God is real, then virtually everything you believe about ultimate reality is wrong. It affects your lifestyle and moral views. The difference between you and me is that I'm willing to admit that if I'm wrong, then I have everything to lose. You're only fooling yourself if you think you're not in the same boat.

"That would contradict your primary assumption that the Bible is the trustworthy Word of God"

That's actually NOT the conclusion of the argument. The conclusion of the argument is "Therefore, there is powerful evidence that the Christian God exists". IF there actually are biblical passages that are real "errors" inserted by man, then we simply recognize those passages as such. That's it.

"We are not talking merely about the slaughter of innocent women and children"

You're right. We're not talking about that because the Christian God has NEVER killed or ordered the killing of an "innocent" person. As I stated, the Christian God, being omniscient, KNOWS the ultimate stance that we will take regarding our relationship to God. So God, being eternal (where past, present and future is known to him and ONLY him), has every right to bring any of us to task at any time for our ultimate stance. Hence, it is literally impossible for God to wrongly kill or order the killing of anyone. Judgement day is coming for each soul regardless.

"The main point is the UTTER CORRUPTION that God inflicted upon his people by commanding them to be baby killers"

There was no corruption because GOD IS THE ONE WHO KILLED THOSE PEOPLE through his guided army. The Israelite army was simply the means that God used to kill those EVIL souls. He moved their spirit to act on his behalf. You see, physical maturation is an attribute of our physical bodies, not the soul. God KNOWS the soul of every man and every soul is simply housed in and limited in its ability to express itself by the physical body. So God doesn't kill "babies". Rather, he brings wicked souls to task for their ultimate rejection of God whenever he chooses (which is his sovereign right to do so). And I can't emphasize this enough ... You CANNOT refute the argument I spelled out by appealing to what you think are morally questionable passages. The conclusion STILL follows from the premises.

JESUS IS GOD (I am Gambini and I am willing to admit that I am NOT God).

[Richard Amiel McGough]

Okay ... I'm going to try and keep the shouting to a minimum :P

Excellent! :thumb:

I think we could have a very interesting (and mutually challenging) conversation. I admit that there is evidence supporting your position. But I have always rejected the simple-minded fundamentalism that tells God what kind of book he had to inspire (inerrant and infallible). I've always recognized that as both factually false and biblically unjustified.



"Paul was not talking about the NT when he said "all SCRIPTURE" because he didn't even know there was or would be an "NT." There is nothing in his writings that indicate he thought he was writing Scripture"

But Peter refers to Paul's writings as scripture. Hence, the NT does refer to itself as being inspired by the Christian God. Btw, I don't even necessarily need to use language like "the Christian Bible" anyways. If we can agree that the 66 book canon of the Bible entails a supernatural design, then that entire canon is a supernaturally designed book. And if the 66 book canon is a supernaturally designed book, then WHEREVER it claims to be an inspiration of the Christian God, that would apply to the ENTIRE canon (since the 66 book canon would be a supernaturally designed, unified canon). Does that make sense?

Yes, it makes sense, but it's not nearly as simple as you suggest and I don't think your conclusion follows. The fact that Peter referred to Paul's epistles as Scripture does not imply that Paul was talking about a yet future "NT" when he said that "all scripture is inspired by God." And it does not necessarily imply that God was intending us to think he was talking about the unified canon. That is possible, but there is no way for us to know. It could be just the opposite. What if God designed the Bible Wheel with the intent to include fiction or fallacious crap for his own purposes? How would you know? The simple fact is that you do not know, and since the Bible does contain a lot of stuff that most rational folks see as fictional and fallacious we have good reason to doubt anyone who insists that God had to inspire an "inerrant and infallible" Bible. And besides all that, merely concluding that the Bible is "inspired" tells us very little since we don't know what "inspired" entails. And worse, we would still have to interpret it according to our own fallible abilities.

Here are the facts we apparently agree upon:

1) The NT says an undefined set of OT books are Scripture.
2) Peter said Paul's letters are Scripture.
3) The Protestant canon has a pattern that suggests "supernatural design."

I put "supernatural design" in scare quotes because that's not the only possible explanation. For example, there could be a natural explanation in terms of manifestation of archetypes, scribal selection (like evolution), or some else. But I do admit that the "supernatural" is (ironically) the most "natural" explanation given the Christian presuppositions and context.

Now despite all this agreement, I cannot agree with your conclusion that "WHEREVER it claims to be an inspiration of the Christian God, that would apply to the ENTIRE canon." That seems like a total non sequitur. Remember, there is no definition of "the canon" in the Bible. There is absolutely no reason to think that Paul was talking about "the canon" which did not even exist yet. He was obviously talking about the OT. Indeed, he could also have been talking about books that never made it into the canon. You make too many unjustified assumptions in your argument. The fact that 2 Peter refers to Paul's letters as Scripture suggests that 2 Peter was written late in the first century at best, and many scholars date it in the mid second century. Consider this commentary from Richard J. Bauckham's entry in the Word Biblical Commentary on 2 Peter 3:16 -
To determine the precise implication of this, we should first note that the term γραφή (“scripture”) was not limited to the books of the OT canon, but could be used for apocryphal writings (Jas 4:5; Barn. 16:5; 1 Clem 23:3; cf. Herm. Vis. 2:3:4: ὡς γέγραπται, “as it is written”). It need not therefore imply a canon of Scripture at all. The inclusion of Paul’s letters in this category certainly means they are regarded as inspired, authoritative writings (as v 15 in fact says), ranked alongside the OT and probably various other books, including other apostolic writings. Probably the implication is that they are suitable for reading in Christian worship. But this does not at all require the conclusion that the author of 2 Peter knows a NT canon. Apostolic writings must have ranked as authoritative writings, suitable for reading in Christian worship, long before there was any fixed NT canon.

It is hard to tell at what date Paul’s letters could have begun to be called γραφαί (“scriptures”), but there is no real difficulty in dating 2 Pet 3:16 in the late first century. In 2 Clem. 14:2 apostolic writings are ranked alongside the OT: “the books (τὰ βιβλία, i.e. the OT) and the apostles declare” (see Donfried, Second Clement, 93–95). Possible early instances of NT texts being called γραφαί (“scriptures”) are 1 Tim 5:18 (perhaps a quotation of Matt 10:10, called γραφή along with an OT text); 2 Clem 2:4 (a Gospel saying is called ἑτέρα γραφή, “another scripture,” following an OT quotation); Barn. 4:14 (ὡς γέγραπται, “as it is written,” introduces a quotaton from Matt 22:14); Pol. Phil. 12:1 (Ps 4:5 and Eph 4:26 are called his scripturis, “these scriptures”). The fact that in four of these instances a NT quotation is placed alongside an OT text is not insignificant. It shows that Gospels and apostolic writings were coming to be ranked with the OT Scriptures. There is nothing at all surprising in this development. Apostolic writings were regarded as inspired and authoritative from the beginning (see above). Once they were being read along with the OT in Christian worship, it was quite natural that the term γραφή (“scripture”) should come to be used for them.

“The other scriptures” could have included Gospels, whose predictions of the imminent Parousia the false teachers would have interpreted as false prophecy and rejected, as perhaps they did Paul’s. We know (from 1:20–21) that they misinterpreted OT prophecies, in that they interpreted them as only the human ideas of the prophets and therefore dismissed them. Whether it is also implied that there were OT and non-Pauline apostolic writings in which the false teachers claimed to find support for their views it is impossible to tell.
Lot's of books that didn't make it into the canon were cited along with Scripture just like Paul's letters. So that is not proof of inspiration.


"We don't know what books they thought were included in the OT"

We know all the present OT books were seen as scripture. And it doesn't matter anyways because again, if there is a supernatural design in the 66 book canon, then that MEANS all the OT books in the 66 book canon obviously belong there.

No we don't know that. There are a number of books that were contested, e.g. Esther and the Song of Songs (probably because they don't mention God, and the Song is pornographic).

Now I grant that a supernatural design of the whole is a good argument for the canon, but that's not the point because even if God put those books together, it wouldn't tell us anything about how to interpret them or if the specific statements in them were true, false, fiction, or whatever. The only thing we would know is that the Inscrutable God put inscrutable words in a nice pattern.


"They were obviously wrong about many things"

We already went through this, Richard. IF there is a supernatural design in the 66 book canon, then "error" (at least on the part of the designer) isn't an option. The "error" must be in your own interpretation. The alleged "contradictions" could be just apparent contradictions (much like the apparent contradictions in nature itself, which serve to pull us into a deeper study of the natural world). The scientific "errors" could be seen as metaphorical or poetic language (a very common tool among the ancients). If there actually were examples of real "errors" in the 66 book canon, the logical conclusion would be those examples were inserted by fallible men. It certainly does absolutely nothing to explain away the supernatural evidence of the 66 book canon OR the fact that this supernaturally designed canon claims itself to be inspired by the Christian God. That's for sure.

This is your most fundamental error. The fact that there is a design of the canon does not prove anything at all about to interpret the content of the books, let alone if it is true, false, human, or divine. You are not the Lord over God. You cannot tell him what sort of book he is allowed to inspire. You cannot command him to obey your logic based on your own presuppositions. And given the fact that he obviously went to great pains to make it look like there are contradictions, errors, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to himself in his own book, we have very good reason to reject your assertion as directly contrary to the Divine Intent. This is how I understood the Bible even in my most fundamentalist days. It was the Bible Wheel that allowed me to reject all the problems as ultimately irrelevant because they were trumped by the Bible Wheel. But that doesn't mean that I thought we could make up "explanations" to show that they weren't "really" contradictions! No! You've got it backwards. The Bible Wheel enabled me to accept the problems as part of God's design which he designed for his own purposes. I understood them as stumbling stones, just like Christ:
1 Peter 2:6 Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. 7 Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, 8 And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed.
I saw a deep analogy between Christ as the Living Word of God and the Bible as the Written Word of God. Both were "stones of stumbling" to those who disbelieved. I understood that God designed the Bible so believers would have everything needed to believe, and unbelievers would have everything needed to "unbelieve."

It seems just plain silly to think that the contradictions are only "apparent" because if God didn't want us to think there were real errors, he wouldn't have made it look like there were real errors. This is the highest view of Scripture. The attempt to "explain them all away" makes God look like an idiot writing in crayon.



"There is no such "god" as the Christian God"

Sure there is. The NT CLEARLY teaches that Jesus is God. It doesn't matter that there are various biblical interpretations. If God allowed man to come up with various false interpretations about the natural world, then why wouldn't he allow man to come up with various false interpretations about scripture??? He obviously DOES allow it. People are free to come up with all sorts of ideas about nature AND scripture.

One man's clarity is another man's confusion. You should jump in on the thread Jesus is not God (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?2803-Jesus-is-not-God) started by David M. He will agree with you absolutely that the Bible is the Word of God, but he will disagree with you just as absolutely that there is any verse that teaches Jesus is God.

My point stands. It took four centuries before the doctrine of the Trinity could even be articulated and it was forced on those who disagreed with violence.


"I think this is proof enough that the Bible is ambiguous"

The idea that the bible is ambiguous on the deity of Christ is absurd. And that's the point ... There are CLEARLY certain doctrines that the bible teaches (such as deity of Christ, the personhood of Satan, the existence of the angelic and demonic realm, life after death or the eternal separation of the righteous from the wicked) and yet you have self identifying Christians who reject these things. That has nothing to do with any ambiguity on the part of the biblical text. The fact of the matter is that the reason there are so many conflicting views on what the bible actually teaches is because people have a tendency to believe what they WANT to believe (which is why the bible ends with a warning to not take away from or add anything to scripture).

This is getting even more interesting. David M believes absolutely that the Bible is God's Word. And he is just as absolute in his denial of both the deity of Christ and the personhood of Satan. See his latest thread on this topic called Cain and Abel - the origin of the devil explained (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?3708-Cain-and-Abel-the-origin-of-the-devil-explained) where he explains that there is no being called the "Devil" or "Satan" and that those terms are just personifications of our bad and self-accusatory thoughts. And while you are at it, you may enjoy learning that there is no "demonic realm" and there are no "fallen angels" because angels cannot sin, as explained in his thread God's will is done in heaven (http://www.biblewheel.com/forum/showthread.php?3352-God-s-will-is-done-in-Heaven). For you to suggest that this "has nothing to do with any ambiguity on the part of the biblical text" seem quite naive and uninformed to me. The most devout and dedicated students of Scripture have wrestled for two millennia to understand the ambiguities in those doctrines.

Do you exclude yourself when you say "people have a tendency to believe what they WANT to believe"? If not, then why mention it? Maybe all your doctrines are false and they are "just what you want to believe." How would you know? All you could say is that you are confident your logic, knowledge, and presuppositions are better than those who disagree with you, so all I see are potsherds clashing with potsherds.



"I am not making up random possibilities in an effort to "dismiss" anything"

Richard, you are. If the supernaturally designed 66 book canon claims that it is inspired by the Christian God, then there is no reason to "explore" any other explanations (REGARDLESS of any potential "errors" you may feel is in the text)! The fact that there is supernatural design BACKS UP its own claim. My position is not "logically incoherent" at all. If you feel there are real "errors", then they were inserted by man. Simple. That does NOTHING to change the fact that there is powerful evidence of supernatural design in the bible and for the Christian God (since the bible clearly claims to be inspired by the Christian God).

I don't understand how you could say there is "no reason to explore other explanations." There is EVERY REASON to explore alternatives if the "Christian God" proves to be impossible. Yes, the design appears to back up your presupposition that the Bible was inspired by God, but that is only one possibility and since that is impossible for other reasons, there must be another explanation.

I get the impression that you are not really looking at all the evidence. It is impossible to believe in square circles. That is the "Christian God" presented in the Bible. It is literally impossible to believe a logical contradiction, and there is no amount of logic that will change that. If the Christian God is logically incoherent then we are FORCED to look for "other explanations" for the design.



"We are not talking merely about the slaughter of innocent women and children"

You're right. We're not talking about that because the Christian God has NEVER killed or ordered the killing of an "innocent" person. As I stated, the Christian God, being omniscient, KNOWS the ultimate stance that we will take regarding our relationship to God. So God, being eternal (where past, present and future is known to him and ONLY him), has every right to bring any of us to task at any time for our ultimate stance. Hence, it is literally impossible for God to wrongly kill or order the killing of anyone. Judgement day is coming for each soul regardless.

Great! You believe babies are guilty and deserve death? So much for the wonderful Christian morality. William Lane Craig is famous for trying to save God from the Bible by saying that the murder of the children was actually their salvation because they were all under the age of accountability and so automatically went to heaven. How he failed to see that he also justified abortions is beyond me. It just goes to show how desperate Christians will make up anything to protect their dogmas. This is how I know that I am correct in rejecting it all. I've looked and I've seen that Christian apologetics is truly an abyss of absurdity.



"The main point is the UTTER CORRUPTION that God inflicted upon his people by commanding them to be baby killers"

There was no corruption because GOD IS THE ONE WHO KILLED THOSE PEOPLE through his guided army. The Israelite army was simply the means that God used to kill those EVIL souls. He moved their spirit to act on his behalf. You see, physical maturation is an attribute of our physical bodies, not the soul. God KNOWS the soul of every man and every soul is simply housed in and limited in its ability to express itself by the physical body. So God doesn't kill "babies". Rather, he brings wicked souls to task for their ultimate rejection of God whenever he chooses (which is his sovereign right to do so). And I can't emphasize this enough ... You CANNOT refute the argument I spelled out by appealing to what you think are morally questionable passages. The conclusion STILL follows from the premises.

God did not kill those people. He ordered humans to pick up swords and slice up babies and their mommies.

Your assertion that those souls were "evil" is totally unjustified. Many of them were babies! One friend on this forum explained they had to be killed because they were demonized, but that's absurd because God could have exorcised them, and beside, it is doubly absurd because God ordered everyone killed except 32,000 sexy virgins. And that's particularly absurd because that is in direct violation of his own command that the Israelites not take wives from the people of the land.

And yes, it may be God's "right" to slaughter babies, but he can't then tell us that he is kind. Even God cannot make square circles.

I am really enjoying this conversation. I am totally mystified by the Bible Wheel and would love to find out what it really entails.

Great chatting!

Richard

[Gambini]

"There is no definition of "the canon" in the Bible"

Richard, THE DESIGN OF THE BIBLE WHEEL DEMONSTRATES WHAT THE CANON IS! So we can reasonable know that THAT CANON is THE CANON being referred to as scripture. Hence, the bible wheel is evidence for the divine inspiration of ALL 66 books of the bible!

"Great! You believe babies are guilty and deserve death?"

God, and God alone, FOREKNOWS whether anyone is eternally guilty of rejecting him. It is logically impossible for God to wrongly kill (or order the killing of) anyone REGARDLESS of biological age. God is omniscient and FOREKNOWS our ultimate decisions. So he, as the rightful judge of man, has the divine right to bring anyone to task for their ultimate rejection of God at any point he chooses (since their day is going to come eventually). Some of these demons simply get their asses kicked sooner than others. But they will all eventually have their day. And yes, there ARE biblical cases where God uses people to execute his wrath (for example, he moved the spirit of the Assyrians to jack up the rebellious Israelites). The Canaanites were practicing CHILD SACRIFICE and BESTIALITY for 400 years! Thank God he crushed that SICK culture through the sword of his people! If God ordered it, then the infant victims were FOREKNOWN demons. Point blank.

But let's get to the REAL issue ...

You claim that even though the bible wheel is evidence of a nonhuman or supernatural origin, you can't accept it as being inspired by the Christian God because it contains "errors" and attributes "immoral" behavior to him. Okay. For the sake of argument, lets say we grant those problems for a minute. Lets say we can't trust the entire bible because of the issues you raised. NOW WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH??? Bring in the syllogism ...

Premise 1) The CREATION HOLOGRAPH states FLAT OUT that God Exists, that he created the universe and that Jesus is God.

Premise 2) The CREATION HOLOGRAPH is evidence of supernatural design.

Therefore, the CREATION HOLOGRAPH is evidence that God exists, that he created the universe and that Jesus is God.

Now what??? Notice how you can't appeal to all your excuses about alleged problems found throughout the bible. We're STRICTLY dealing with the passages within the CREATION HOLOGRAPH. Furthermore, when you combine this with the fact that the same numbers we find encoded in Genesis 1:1 are actually found encoded in the human genome (demonstrating that the AUTHOR of the CREATION HOLOGRAPH is the same AUTHOR of the human genome), the evidence becomes overwhelming!

JESUS IS GOD ... JESUS IS GOD ... JESUS IS GOD ... That's three triple 8's in a row, sir.

[Richard Amiel McGough]

"There is no definition of "the canon" in the Bible"

Richard, THE DESIGN OF THE BIBLE WHEEL DEMONSTRATES WHAT THE CANON IS! So we can reasonable know that THAT CANON is THE CANON being referred to as scripture. Hence, the bible wheel is evidence for the divine inspiration of ALL 66 books of the bible!

Hey there Gambini,

I think you are getting confused about your own argument. You are repeating the same assertion even though it has been refuted. Let me remind you of the sequence of our conversation. You began by asserting this syllogism in your OP:
Gambini: Premise 1) The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 2) If the Christian bible contains information that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up the claim being made under premise 1.
Premise 3) The Christian bible DOES contain information that could never have been produced by man.
THEREFORE, the Christian God EXISTS!

I responded by giving reasons to reject the first two premises as false. Here is the reason I gave to reject Premise 1:
Richard: Premise 1 is false. There is no such thing as "the" Christian Bible. There are a number of books that Christians claim to be "the Bible." They contain different sets of books, and there is nothing in the text of any of them that says which books are supposed to be included. In other words, there is no "Christian Bible" that defines itself, so it is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for "the" Christian Bible to even refer to itself, let alone declare that it is "the Word of God."

You responded by asserting I was wrong:
Gambini: OF COURSE THERE IS A CHRISTIAN BIBLE, RICHARD! The BIBLE WHEEL, which was discovered by some guy named Rich, DEMONSTRATES that THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE of 66 books (Genesis to Revelation) IS a unified canon. So you FAILED miserably to refute premise 1. Lets see how you did with premise 2 ...

And I responded by explaining your error:
Richard: You are changing your argument. You said nothing about the Bible Wheel in your Premise 1. Your first premise was that "The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God." That is NOT TRUE. There is no verse in the Bible that says the Protestant Canon of 66 books was "inspired by the Christian God."

And you responded by IGNORING my point and merely repeating your unfounded assertion:
Gambini: WRONG, Richard! We know the 66 book canon is THE unified biblical canon (per the bible wheel discovery) and we KNOW that the entire Old Testament canon was treated by the New Testament writers as divinele inspired by the Christian God. Furthermore, Peter refers to the writings of Paul, which make up the MAJORITY of the New Testament canon, as SCRIPTURE (and all SCRIPTURE is divinely inspired by the Christian God according to Paul, REMEMBER?). So to sum up ...

I responded by exposing your errors again:
Richard: First, you are just repeating your error that I already exposed. Paul was not talking about the NT when he said "all SCRIPTURE" because he didn't even know there was or would be an "NT." There is nothing in his writings that indicate he thought he was writing Scripture. He wrote LETTERS to believers encouraging them in the faith. Second, your assumption that "that the entire Old Testament canon was treated by the New Testament writers as divinele inspired by the Christian God" is false. We don't know what books they thought were included in the OT. If we go by what the human authors believed, then we cannot assume that Paul was talking about the NT when he said "all scripture is inspired of God." This has been debated for 2000 years, and the two largest denominations (Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox) came to a different conclusion than the Protestants.

And you responded by repeating your claim that I had already proven to be false:
Gambini: But Peter refers to Paul's writings as scripture. Hence, the NT does refer to itself as being inspired by the Christian God. Btw, I don't even necessarily need to use language like "the Christian Bible" anyways. If we can agree that the 66 book canon of the Bible entails a supernatural design, then that entire canon is a supernaturally designed book. And if the 66 book canon is a supernaturally designed book, then WHEREVER it claims to be an inspiration of the Christian God, that would apply to the ENTIRE canon (since the 66 book canon would be a supernaturally designed, unified canon). Does that make sense?

So I responded by explaining your error yet again:
Richard: Now despite all this agreement, I cannot agree with your conclusion that "WHEREVER it claims to be an inspiration of the Christian God, that would apply to the ENTIRE canon." That seems like a total non sequitur. Remember, there is no definition of "the canon" in the Bible. There is absolutely no reason to think that Paul was talking about "the canon" which did not even exist yet. He was obviously talking about the OT. Indeed, he could also have been talking about books that never made it into the canon. You make too many unjustified assumptions in your argument. The fact that 2 Peter refers to Paul's letters as Scripture suggests that 2 Peter was written late in the first century at best, and many scholars date it in the mid second century.

And you responded by repeating the same error - that the Bible refers to itself as a whole - yet again, a third time!
Gambini: Richard, THE DESIGN OF THE BIBLE WHEEL DEMONSTRATES WHAT THE CANON IS! So we can reasonable know that THAT CANON is THE CANON being referred to as scripture. Hence, the bible wheel is evidence for the divine inspiration of ALL 66 books of the bible!

We are going in loops here Gambini. You are not responding intelligently to the explanations I have given.

Your argument is based fundamentally on the assertion that the Bible refers to itself as a unified whole. That assertion is emphatically false. The Bible does not refer to itself as anything like the 66 book canon that exists today. Your argument fails. I have proven it and you have not been able to refute my proof. You haven't even addressed what I wrote! You just repeat the same error over and over no matter how many times I have exposed it.



God, and God alone, FOREKNOWS whether anyone is eternally guilty of rejecting him. It is logically impossible for God to wrongly kill (or order the killing of) anyone REGARDLESS of biological age. God is omniscient and FOREKNOWS our ultimate decisions. So he, as the rightful judge of man, has the divine right to bring anyone to task for their ultimate rejection of God at any point he chooses (since their day is going to come eventually). Some of these demons simply get their asses kicked sooner than others. But they will all eventually have their day. And yes, there ARE biblical cases where God uses people to execute his wrath (for example, he moved the spirit of the Assyrians to jack up the rebellious Israelites). The Canaanites were practicing CHILD SACRIFICE and BESTIALITY for 400 years! Thank God he crushed that SICK culture through the sword of his people! If God ordered it, then the infant victims were FOREKNOWN demons. Point blank.

Now wait a minute! If they were all sick demons deserving death, then why was it so horrible that the parent demons were killing their demon-children? Were not the Canaanites doing the very thing (in part) that God commanded the Israelites to do?

And if it was so bad for the Canaanites to kill some of their own children, why was it good for God to command his people to kill ALL their children?

Your excuses show the radical incoherence of your "Biblical morality." It's the purest form of bullshit. No one with half a brain could believe any of it.



But let's get to the REAL issue ...

You claim that even though the bible wheel is evidence of a nonhuman or supernatural origin, you can't accept it as being inspired by the Christian God because it contains "errors" and attributes "immoral" behavior to him. Okay. For the sake of argument, lets say we grant those problems for a minute. Lets say we can't trust the entire bible because of the issues you raised. NOW WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH??? Bring in the syllogism ...

Premise 1) The CREATION HOLOGRAPH states FLAT OUT that God Exists, that he created the universe and that Jesus is God.

Premise 2) The CREATION HOLOGRAPH is evidence of supernatural design.

Therefore, the CREATION HOLOGRAPH is evidence that God exists, that he created the universe and that Jesus is God.

Now what??? Notice how you can't appeal to all your excuses about alleged problems found throughout the bible. We're STRICTLY dealing with the passages within the CREATION HOLOGRAPH. Furthermore, when you combine this with the fact that the same numbers we find encoded in Genesis 1:1 are actually found encoded in the human genome (demonstrating that the AUTHOR of the CREATION HOLOGRAPH is the same AUTHOR of the human genome), the evidence becomes overwhelming!

JESUS IS GOD ... JESUS IS GOD ... JESUS IS GOD ... That's three triple 8's in a row, sir.
The creation holograph is a profound mystery. I have no idea how it got there or what it really means. Perhaps there are profound, deep, archetypal meanings to the ideas of God as Universal Mind and Jesus as the Archetypal Human that are all encoded in those passages. Who knows? But no matter what the truth turns out to be, I am confident it will be a far cry from your ridiculous fundamentalism that preaches HELL FOR BABIES that would have rejected God if he had let them live. You just don't see how ludicrous your theology looks when juxtaposed with the sublime wisdom and beauty of the Creation Holograph. It doesn't matter if the creation holograph proves there is a God because there is no way that any God sufficiently intelligent to design the creation holograph could also be the author of the ugly and perverse theology that you preach. It's all so very inhuman. There is no truth in it. You think people are damned because of their opinions about religious dogmas? How absurd! No mind capable of designing the Creation Holograph would damn people to hell for rejecting the the Bible and the God it presents. It is filled with errors, contradictions, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to God. It seems more likely that God would damn a soul for preaching that he had committed the moral abominations attributed to him in the Bible.

Perhaps the Bible is from God, and is a TEST to see who follows truth vs. who follows dogmas and the teachings of cults that deny their very humanity - the root of all that is good and true! No godly person could believe the image of God presented in the Bible. Even the Gospel is a moral abomination in that it denies the very meaning of the word "righteous" and rewards the guilty with eternal life while punishing all others in eternal hell for the "crime" of not submitting to unproven religious dogmas.

You just don't get it. Your arguments strike me like spitwads from an incorrigible child who has no concept of what he is attacking. Nothing you have written even begins to touch the real issues at the heart of the matter. You are reacting against stereotypes of unbelievers, not realizing that I have thought deeply and sincerely about these issues.

Talk to me like a man if you dare. Your canned arguments are utterly vain and meaningless. They are the fruit of a mind chained by dogmas.

[Gambini]

"We are going in loops here Gambini. You are not responding intelligently to the explanations I have given"

YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN ANY EXPLANATIONS, RICHARD! I'm starting to think you're INTENTIONALLY playing dumb. I mean, what part don't you get??? I don't have to list evidence supporting a premise IN a syllogism. You KNOW that! The evidence backing the premise is outlined once you ask for it. And I GAVE you just that. I pointed to the large scale structure of the 66 book canon as EVIDENCE to back up my premise.

For you to STILL claim the bible wheel doesn't point to the 66 book canon as THE Christian bible is truly absurd. I can't even take you serious at this point. Again, WHAT PART DON'T YOU GET??? The OVERALL structure of the 66 book canon SHOWS divine design. THEREFORE, any INTERNAL claims (in the bible itself) of one book being inspired by God APPLIES TO THE ENTIRE 66 BOOK CANON (since EACH of the 66 books is part of the supernatural design of the bible wheel)!


"Your argument is based fundamentally on the assertion that the Bible refers to itself as a unified whole"

No, the bible wheel DEMONSTRATES that it is a unified whole! Hence, any INTERNAL claims of any one of the 66 books being inspired by the Christian God APPLIES TO EVERY BOOK IN THE BIBLE WHEEL CANON.


"If they were all sick demons deserving death, then why was it so horrible that the parent demons were killing their demon-children?"

That's an incredibly stupid question, Richard. Only GOD HIMSELF has the right to render an infant to the sword because only HE has that kind of foreknowledge. Only he knows the ultimate destiny of every soul and only he has the right to bring any of us to task at any point he chooses (again, REGARDLESS of biological age). The Canaanites were INDISCRIMINATELY slaughtering children. Their culture needed to be erased and their destruction is a type of God's ultimate judgment on the wicked. God DISCRIMINATES between the righteous and the wicked and only he FOREKNOWS every righteous and every wicked person. And he can use his servants to execute his divine will by moving them to act on his behalf.

"The creation holograph is a profound mystery; But no matter what the truth turns out to be, I am confident it will be a far cry from your ridiculous fundamentalism"

LMAO ... WOW! I can't believe how intellectually dishonest you are. Richard, do you understand that pointing to the problems you have with the rest of the bible HAVE NO BEARING ON THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH AND THE PASSAGES CONTAINED THEREIN??? I specifically pointed that out to you and you just ignored it and started running your whole line about "errors" and "moral abominations". STICK WITH THE PASSAGES CONTAINED IN THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH (which FLAT OUT state that God exists, that God created the universe and that Jesus is God)!

So why don't you accept the claims being made in the passages of the creation holograph given the creation holograph ITSELF (and the corresponding link between the Genesis 1:1 numbers and the human genome) is evidence of supernatural design???

JESUS IS GOD (every creature will eventually confess this in due time, sir).

[Richard Amiel McGough]

"We are going in loops here Gambini. You are not responding intelligently to the explanations I have given"

YOU HAVEN'T GIVEN ANY EXPLANATIONS, RICHARD! I'm starting to think you're INTENTIONALLY playing dumb. I mean, what part don't you get??? I don't have to list evidence supporting a premise IN a syllogism. You KNOW that! The evidence backing the premise is outlined once you ask for it. And I GAVE you just that. I pointed to the large scale structure of the 66 book canon as EVIDENCE to back up my premise.

Hey there Gambini,

I most certainly have given explanations. You have simply ignored them. You began this thread with the following syllogism:
Premise 1) The Christian bible claims to be inspired by the Christian God.
Premise 2) If the Christian bible contains information that could not have been produced by man, then THAT backs up the claim being made under premise 1.
Premise 3) The Christian bible DOES contain information that could never have been produced by man.
THEREFORE, the Christian God EXISTS!
I then pointed out the obvious reasons your first premise was flawed as follows:
Premise 1 is false. There is no such thing as "the" Christian Bible. There are a number of books that Christians claim to be "the Bible." They contain different sets of books, and there is nothing in the text of any of them that says which books are supposed to be included. In other words, there is no "Christian Bible" that defines itself, so it is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for "the" Christian Bible to even refer to itself, let alone declare that it is "the Word of God."
You responded by merely asserting the following:
OF COURSE THERE IS A CHRISTIAN BIBLE, RICHARD! The BIBLE WHEEL, which was discovered by some guy named Rich, DEMONSTRATES that THE CHRISTIAN BIBLE of 66 books (Genesis to Revelation) IS a unified canon. So you FAILED miserably to refute premise 1. Lets see how you did with premise 2 ...
So I informed you that you were changing your argument because your initial syllogism did not mention anything about the Bible Wheel. It seems you don't understand the nature of logic. If you want to prove that something is LOGICALLY necessary (using a syllogism) you need to prove each premise. You cannot merely assert things without justification. That's what you've been doing. You merely reasserted your idea that the existence of the Bible Wheel proves that the Bible refers to the canon as a whole. That simply does not follow. It is mere assertion. Here is how you expressed it:
WRONG, Richard! We know the 66 book canon is THE unified biblical canon (per the bible wheel discovery) and we KNOW that the entire Old Testament canon was treated by the New Testament writers as divinele inspired by the Christian God. Furthermore, Peter refers to the writings of Paul, which make up the MAJORITY of the New Testament canon, as SCRIPTURE (and all SCRIPTURE is divinely inspired by the Christian God according to Paul, REMEMBER?).

You have not justified any of your assertions. The mere existence of the Bible Wheel does not imply that the human writers of the Bible were referring to a "unified canon" when they mentioned "Scripture". Indeed, that view is obviously false because the NT writers did not know that their writings would later be collected into a "unified canon" so there is no way they could have been referring to that canon. And there is another reason we know it is false. The OT speaks of the canon that then existed which was NOT the 66 book canon. So your argument fails. If you want to press it, you will need to begin by establishing which, if any, references to "Scripture" in the Bible can be SHOWN to be references to the 66 book canon that did not even exist at the time those verses were written. Good luck with that.


For you to STILL claim the bible wheel doesn't point to the 66 book canon as THE Christian bible is truly absurd. I can't even take you serious at this point. Again, WHAT PART DON'T YOU GET??? The OVERALL structure of the 66 book canon SHOWS divine design. THEREFORE, any INTERNAL claims (in the bible itself) of one book being inspired by God APPLIES TO THE ENTIRE 66 BOOK CANON (since EACH of the 66 books is part of the supernatural design of the bible wheel)!

The fact that you must SCREAM indicates that you are the one who just "doesn't get it." My logic is serene, pure, clean, and lucid. I have proven over and over again that I freely admit anything that logically follows. Case in point: I agree that the Bible Wheel points to "the 66 book canon as THE Christian bible" but that's irrelevant to your argument. The fact that the Bible Wheel gives evidence of a canon does not mean that the canon is mentioned as such anywhere in Scripture. Likewise, the fact that one NT author (Peter) refers to another (Paul) as inspired does not justify any claims about the canon as a whole. Your logic simply does not follow. For example, any of the books, such as Esther, Ecclesiastes, or the Song of Solomon (to remind you of the books that make little or no mention of God), could be entirely "uninspired" and yet included by God in the canon for his own purposes. This exemplifies how your logic is full of holes and false assumptions. It appears you care more for dogmas than for truth.



"Your argument is based fundamentally on the assertion that the Bible refers to itself as a unified whole"

No, the bible wheel DEMONSTRATES that it is a unified whole! Hence, any INTERNAL claims of any one of the 66 books being inspired by the Christian God APPLIES TO EVERY BOOK IN THE BIBLE WHEEL CANON.

Again, you are merely repeating your fallacious assertion. The fact that the Bible Wheel shows a unity to the 66 book canon does not imply that there are any references to that canon in the text of Scripture. This is self-evident because the canon was not complete at the time any of the writers wrote, so they could not have been referring to it. You could argue that God knew and that's why he inspired Paul to speak of "all Scripture" but that's a different argument that you have not yet put forth (despite the fact that I've clued you into it in a previous post).



"The creation holograph is a profound mystery; But no matter what the truth turns out to be, I am confident it will be a far cry from your ridiculous fundamentalism"


LMAO ... WOW! I can't believe how intellectually dishonest you are. Richard, do you understand that pointing to the problems you have with the rest of the bible HAVE NO BEARING ON THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH AND THE PASSAGES CONTAINED THEREIN??? I specifically pointed that out to you and you just ignored it and started running your whole line about "errors" and "moral abominations". STICK WITH THE PASSAGES CONTAINED IN THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH (which FLAT OUT state that God exists, that God created the universe and that Jesus is God)!

Intellectually dishonest? Ha! You describe yourself and all who would defend the absurdities in the Bible. How pathetic.

You contradict yourself when you say that "the rest of the bible HAVE NO BEARING ON THE CREATION HOLOGRAPH AND THE PASSAGES CONTAINED THEREIN" because you are the one who said that the Creation Holograph "states FLAT OUT that God Exists, that he created the universe and that Jesus is God." So by your own words, you explicitly state that the Creation holograph has everything to do with "the rest of the Bible." You would know nothing of Jesus except by reference to the "rest of the Bible." How can you assert such absurdities?

Your are lost in mindless moronic religious dogmatism. You can't form a rational argument. You repeat the same errors over and over and over again no matter how many times they are exposed. And worst of all, you insult me as "intellectually dishonest" when in fact I have been TOTALLY and ABSOLUTELY HONEST with you. I have admitted everything you have said that can be supported by logic and facts. And how have you responded? By screaming and yelling and pissing your pants. How pathetic.




So why don't you accept the claims being made in the passages of the creation holograph given the creation holograph ITSELF (and the corresponding link between the Genesis 1:1 numbers and the human genome) is evidence of supernatural design???

JESUS IS GOD (every creature will eventually confess this in due time, sir).

Show me which "claims" in the Creation Holograph have nothing to do with the rest of the Bible that contains the errors, contradictions, absurdities, and moral abominations attributed to Yahweh and then we can talk. As it is, you have demonstrated that your brain is broken. You directly contradict yourself.

As a final note - I am speaking to you in the tone I hear from you. Personally, I am really enjoying this conversation and am not disturbed at all. I want it to continue because I want to know what are the real implications of the Bible Wheel and Holographs. That's why I admit every point you state that is supported by logic and facts. I only reject your empty assertion of religious dogmas that have been used to brainwash believers for two thousand years. I will admit anything you say that can be demonstrated with logic and facts. And I will give you reasons for all my conclusions. Therefore, if the TRUTH is really on your side, you are ensured a victory. Please think about that.

All the best,

Richard