If he's God, I don't understand what that's such a huge freaking stretch. You'd think that someone who created the universe out of nothing could turn some water into wine.

I thought it was more "absurd" along the lines that a being who was a physical manifestation of God is doing party favors.

More absurd than that kind of reckless oversimplification?

Try harder.

Actually, the point of the story wasn't that he turned water to wine but that he turned a single jug of water into enough wine for several hundred people.

*reverses the thread a page*

So that was the first time I've heard the original Fire Temple music. That is annoying as hell. I don't see how people say that is better than the revamped version.

Yeah wine alchemy is pretty absurd sorry

The water into wine thing is either a metaphor or lie. Deal with it.

The situation is pretty ridiculous, but it's probably better to play it safe for Sony's part. Oh and by the way....



I'm not opening it (came in the mail last Friday from an Ebay order) though until I have confirmation this old copy will be playable online when the servers are active.

What a convincing argument.

You are an idiot.

There are two ways you can go about looking at this:

1) Christ the Son of God, and a member of the Trinity. He lived on earth for ~30 years. Being God, the entity that created all of existence, turning water into wine would be a fairly trivial feat.

2) The Bible is made up, and Christ either didn't exist or was greatly exaggerated by a series of legends of a period of 2000 years. In this case your attack is pointless because the person agrees with you.

Your attack on people who believe the first view basically says that turning water into wine is absurd given the second view. This is idiotic. It would be one thing to say the first view is wrong, but your way horribly mangles the suppositions.

So basically it comes down to this; you're giant douche who is sure of yourself that you don't think you have to go to the trouble of making even superficially rational attacks on things that you disagree with. This puts you about three notches below a flat earther.

I'm coming into this argument a bit late and I just briefly see some things I want to clear up (I went to a Jesuit high school)

At least from what I know - they are very few "Radical Contextualists" which take the bible word for word. Most Christians are "Moderate Contextualists" which realize things are not all etched in stone facts. Maybe some things said could be metaphors.

Also - The bible was written like -- 50ish years after the actual events happened. So memory may have been hazy. Also being some things being recalled by word of month through stories, slightly exagerated and changed over the years from what really happened.

Ever hear your friend say how big that fish he caught was? What people say and then later tell usually vary.

Actually that would be a period of 2 to 4 hundred years, depending on the exact book of the new testament you're talking about. The only things written by the people they are attributed to are Peter's letters and the book of Revelation (Which was not written by John the Apostle; it was written by John of Atmos, iirc.)

Says who? The same things that make it impossible to prove the Bible's authenticity, make it impossible make claims like that. There just aren't enough reliable sources.

You can really only approach this from a presuppositional point of view. Either it is God's word, and being omnipotent, God has had the where with all to preserve it through centuries, or it isn't God's word and the whole thing is practically guaranteed to be a load of crap.

*sits back and munches popcorn*

God of the gaps amirite

Every biblical scholar ever...?

I was pointing out the absurdity of claiming it evolved for 2000 years, by the way. The most you can claim is translation errors; nothing has been purposefully changed in over a millennium.

Oh, yeah for sure. I don't think that anyone thinks that there were major changes in it after the first couple of hundred years, but I know for a fact that not all Biblical scholars think that it was written as late as 200-400AD. It's wasn't until around then that a more or less standard set of scriptures had been adopted, of course.

I think ambiguity may be frustrating this discussion...

I THINK YOU'RE FRUSTRATING THIS DISCUSSION!

quick q: any good posters whose handle starts with o

its actually something that came to mind whilst reading this thread and i couldn't think of an answer

Outlaw_Torn.
Oxyonagon.
...

I think that's it.

Owolfy.

The o's silent. And invisible.

um... actually as far as i can tell currently, and from anything i have seen before. the consensus is that most of the books about the life of jesus were written ... 65-95 AD.
many of the later books such as the acts and letters are attributed to being later, but i have been hard pressed to find any reliable source dating even those later books as late as 400 AD.

Yeah, I mean, we have really old manuscripts. Any issue you would have since then would be about which books are be considered cannon, and there's not a *whole* lot of leeway there. I'm just saying you can't conclusively prove the authenticity of the Bible one way or the other, because historical evidence just isn't good enough. A lot of Christians would disagree, but the presuppositional approach is the only way you can go with stuff like this.

There are a lot of historians who causally try to disprove the Bible, but they are just jumping into a field where they are way out of their league. You don't really see a whole lot of serious external attacks on Christianity from the text itself.

Well the thing is, (most of) the bible is referring to things that actually did happen/are historical/etc. But there is a discrepancy between the written account and actual account. I don't think there is any doubt about this. There is just a lot of "the fish gets bigger each time the story is told" before being written, and some lost in translation too. (Not only in one language to another, but from story to story. Someone might have told a story, and someone hearing it might have interpreted it differently, and when retelling it put that different spin on it unknowingly)


It's just far too of an inaccurate set of events to really argue about... unless the arguement is debating taking every word literally, or not.

It's meant to give people hope, courage, understanding, love, etc... and it does that for a lot of people.

I don't even know what I'm trying to prove here.. but I think that was meant to try to get the argueing to stop. There is no one way or another! Jeez! It's far too hard to proove anything.

and to the original topic: People that get offended over stuff need to take a chill pill. Some thing is either meant to be offensive, or not. The recipient has no say in it, reguardless of how they view it.

The point is, if you're a Christian then you have no foot to stand on when judging other beliefs as silly.

If you genuinely believe this:


Then there is absolutely no reason why you should think this

is absurd. There are people that genuinely believe this ****. They believe their obviously fictional story with as much passion as you do yours (only they have more litigative power).

Fortunately, I'm an atheist so I can safely rest on my assertion that they're both ****ing ridiculous. Water = wine? Jesus = Xenu (I mean 'God')? **** off. I firmly believe in freedom and equality, insofar as that both belief systems are equally ****ing stupid.

Edit: And to remain on-topic, Muhammed can **** off too.

The new testament actually contradicts itself on occasion, there's no real reason to go looking for external sources to attack it with.

Also, there are moments when Jesus was a real dick, interpreted one way, and a saint interpreted another. (Like the story of when he stole corn, and was eating it in the farmer's field (Wait, they had corn? Didn't that come from America?) and the farmer found him and asked him, "Why are you eating my corn?" And Jesus replied, "I was hungry." Either he's a total ******* who believes he's entitled to take whatever he wants, or he's a sage who's achieved a sort of satori.)

Corn just meant any cereal or grain, it's North Americans that use it to refer to Maize.

Oh, okay. I've been wondering about that for awhile.

Wait, so, he was just... eating grain? Off the stalk? WTF.

If I was Jesus, I would have totally changed that Maize in to a Big Mac. Better yet, 100 Big Macs.

Okay, let's say the Bible is in fact God's word, and He has somehow preserved it through centuries and through translations. There is a major problem here:
The Bible is not precise and clear about what meaning it is meant to convey. Any attempt at deriving meaning from the Bible requires interpretation of its text, which means that the meaning is ultimately just projected onto the Bible by the interpreter.
So, we have plenty of different interpretations of the Bible, and no way of knowing which one is right. If God is so good at preserving the text, then why doesn't he preserve the meaning as well?

I don't think we have any bible literalists here for you to argue with.

k

i believe that it was actually the pharisees that ask jesus about it, not the owner of the field. and the issue was that he was picking grain on the sabbath... which raises an interesting question... where the hell was the guy who owned the field?



well here is the fun thing about that. most if not all of the parts of the bible that can be claimed to be "up for interpretation" do not affect christianity as a whole.