Earth’s magnetic field illuminates Biblical history | Hacker News Reader

Earth’s magnetic field illuminates Biblical history

economist.com

Title seems to be backwards. It's more like "Biblical history illuminates the history of the magnetic field"

Yes but the current title sort of implies that the earth's magnetic field had an effect on biblical history, which is a lot more tantalizing and attractive (pun intended) as click bait.

> It is a period, from 400-800BC, when, for reasons not entirely clear, radiocarbon dating breaks down.

That’s rather unsatisfying. Does anyone know some articles that summarize the current theories?

Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallstatt_plateau

It's interesting because others have independently suggested that dates pre-800 BC should be brought forward by about 350 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Rohl) The "plateau" might in fact be entirely illusory, an artifact of inaccuracy in the historical record.

https://archive.md/etgjU

I hope one day humanity will look at the Bible and Quran as some important epic sagas with many interesting historical facts... and that's it.

Be the change you want to see in the world!

Today you can already see the world as you describe. A byproduct of this interpretation is that you get to see all people who sincerely believe in religion as sad, over-the-top fanatics of whatever saga they follow. If you are able to avoid falling in your own self-righteousness, there's no drawbacks to this.

I don't think most people would have any problem with people following their particular universum. What people do have a problem with is that many people are using their religious beliefs to justify hurting others, and as it is now, the laws are extremely lenient towards this kind of behaviour.

I actually see many of the lessons of the Old Testament (I don't know about the sequels, didn't read them) to be as relevant today as they were when written.

You have to take the books in the context of the time in which they were written. They didn't have the same standards of Source Needed as the Wikipedia generation is used to, but attributing the requirement to love your neighbor as being the spoken word of the creator himself, was good enough to get the point across. It is still the basis of Western society today, even if it has been reencoded into more specific laws with more specific punishments for non-compliance.

Your comment is like hoping that Turing's work will one day be regarded for historical interest only, because it was not written considering the features of today's latest Javascript framework.

Without going down the philosophical rabbit hole if religions steered the moral or the other way round, I always like to think that, just as simple tales help explaining and introducing children to more complicated concepts, but when you grow older you don't need those anymore, the same applies to religions and humanity. At some point in history of human societies, religions were/are a good way to move society forward (think of the strict food regulations imposed by some religions, they were for actual public safety due to the hygienic conditions of the society) but eventually they are not needed anymore as global knowledge advances and we now know what causes lightnings and thunders, we don't need a super-human explanation to grasp it or justify them.

Knowing what causes lightning has no bearing on how one should treat one's neighbor. You can use science to make a rocket, but science has no comment on whether you should point it towards the Moon, or towards a neighboring country. Assuming we're "smarter" than our ancestors because we can make nuclear bombs and iphones is a pretty simplistic take, and completely ignores the traditional worldview that brings meaning to the Bible and to ancient stories. Looking back at traditional writing from a modern viewpoint and dismissing what you read because it doesn't fit your modern expectations is really robbing you of the opportunity to participate in what it meant to be truly human for most of human history.

I think you are missing my point completely, as I said in other messages the content of the Bible on the cultural, philosophical and historical level is very important. My biggest issue, implicit in my initial comment, is that we as humanity should grow up and stop needing a mythical figure like a "God Almighty" to care about our neighbor. Also we don't need a god that tells us that, for example, homosexuality is bad or that pork or crab should not be eaten.

I neither agree nor disagree with your point. To understand your point better, in your view of neighbourly care, why should I personally care about my neighbor? If he has an X-Box and I want an X-Box, why shouldn't I just take his?

What is the axiom upon which you base your moral code?

Ancient Romans and Greeks would tell us to grow up and accept that might makes right, slavery is essential to the functioning of society, only men should vote while women supplicate local deities, and that wearing pants is barbaric. So "growing up" is not exactly a recipe for a reliable moral value system.

People are not convinced by facts, and there are infinite facts that need a hierarchy in order to be understood or interacted with. Stories and narratives and cultures provide that cultural hierarchy. Christianity was a huge shift in cultural dynamics and it spread like wildfire and quickly engulfed paganism because Christianity teaches that God is actually a Person that you can have a relationship with (instead of Aristotle's notion of God as First Mover or First Idea), and that anyone, regardless of background, wealth, education, or ethnicity, can have access to that relationship.

It turns out, people can relate to, be influenced by, and learn from participating in stories with other people a LOT more than they can by changed by propositional debates and lectures.

It's the difference between learning to fight by joining a martial arts class, or from just reading a book about martial arts.

Out of an interest in late antiquity, I've been fascinated by the change from paganism to Christianity. Under paganism, rites were carried out to secure favor for the society and if there was a personal aspect, it was transactional (if you grant me favor, I will make such-and-such a sacrifice). But this tradition also contained various mystery cults wherein secrets would be revealed to you upon initiation (the popularity of which increased in late antiquity). Early Christianity can be seen to function in this mystery cult niche, but why should it have proven to be so successful? My suspicion is that the personal aspect of religion and revelation became increasingly important. Why that might be is good fodder for speculation.

To relate this to the part of what darkwater you are responding to:

> My biggest issue, implicit in my initial comment, is that we as humanity should grow up and stop needing a mythical figure like a "God Almighty" to care about our neighbor.

And the heart of your response:

> It turns out, people can relate to, be influenced by, and learn from participating in stories with other people a LOT more than they can by changed by propositional debates and lectures.

I have the sense that there was a moment in western culture (vaguely late golden/silver age of Roman literature) when we could have stepped past religion into philosophy. Stoicism was well-regarded, its aim (like cynicism and epicureanism) was to achieve a state of ataraxia, tranquility, and a major portion of the curriculum was logic. But a mass shift in mentality towards personal divine revelation took place instead, so I (reluctantly) have to agree with you.

Stoicism put a person at the whim of the Fates. It was essentially Calvinism, where you could not affect your destiny, because you were either chosen by the gods, or you weren't. Shakespeare summed up Stoicism well when he said "as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Contrast that with the proposition of Christianity, which is that the Creator of the Universe, because of His infinite love for creation, humbled Himself and condescended so low as to be a Person born in a cave to a poor family, suffered betrayal by almost all of his closest followers, suffered an ignominious death, then rose from the dead on the third day after His death, thereby conquering death by death, and you, poor, broken, sinful, incorrigible you, can have a personal relationship with the God-man who calls Himself Jesus Christ.

The stoic dicta to live in accordance with god/nature and to carefully consider what things are in your control and which not (mainly, the only things in your control are your own judgements). It has nothing to do with the doctrine of The Elect, which if I recall stems from a medieval theological catch-22 (if god is all powerful, and if you can earn your way into heaven with "good works", then the implication is that god would be less than all powerful because you, a lowly human, would have some power in the matter).

But the church both appropriated and denigrated the classical tradition. I wouldn't really expect to see an honest representation of stoicism, or Platonism, or of anything really, from the church.

> It turns out, people can relate to, be influenced by, and learn from participating in stories with other people a LOT more than they can by changed by propositional debates and lectures.

I kind of agree, but I also think that this can change over a large enough amount of time, given that we have a permanent written memory in form of books and a basic instruction for everybody. Kindness and respect of laws for example can be shown and taught as beneficial in the long run for society and you as an individual without the need of a tale or a superhuman being. That's why I'm talking about phases in the humanity journey. And beware, I'm not being judgemental here, just like an adult is not "absolutely better" than a child.

The issue is that a lot of people even today are biblical literalists and they look to the holy books for justification for whatever beliefs they hold in the first place. So you can absorb "love thy neighbor" if that's what you're looking for, but you can also absorb "hate the foreigner" if that's more your inclination. Also, the universe is 6000 years old and don't eat shellfish.

Yes, that is an issue, but people misinterpreting or misusing will always be an issue whenever you create something. That should not invalidate the goodness and wonderfulness of the thing created.

The problem with the Bible is that it's so unclear and contradictory, the reader is able to cobble vastly different theological perspectives together. Hence thousands of denominations who do not get along and historically were violent towards each other. The church up until recent history was a violent institution of power.

One of the reasons for the Old Testament's inclusion in Bible is to put the New Testament in context. The whole point of the New Testament is that it's a (pretty profound) development from the old one.

Eh... "Love your neighbor as yourself" in the context of Leviticus doesn't really have the same meaning as the modern interpretation. It's more like "Love your Israelite neighbour, such that God will continue to favor the Israelites and drive/exterminate your larger scale, non-Israelite neighbors from Canaan."

I get what your trying to say, that they are consistent of stories and moral tales, but the Quran dosent go into many details. Its mostly references to the stories with a few details. It is self described as a clear warning rather.

If you read the english translation then the beauty of the language is completely lost on you, and also much of the meaning. Especially if you are coming from an English only background.

If there is a day when no one believes in the religon, the beauty of language will be how it is remembered. Arabs have very strong oral traditions.

"My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally."

--John Dominic Crossan

Actual human laws based on those "symbolic stories" existed since many, many years before the XX century. And as I said, I think that the Bible and other religious books should be studied as part of human history and they give a good view of the ideas, opinions, people and societies that generated them. And that is very valuable! But they are no reason to keep believing in any "God Almighty", let alone considering a book a proof of its existence. But we are probably at very least a couple of centuries from that, if we will ever get there.

It's worth noting that none of the many authors of the various texts that now constitute the bible would have considered their texts 1. to be part of "the bible" at all (or, indeed, know that any such idea existed) or 2. to constitute "proof" of existence of any particular deity.

anachronistic thinking is tricky and will bite you.

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about 2. The book of John is a clear counterexample.

Reaching for the sabians is a bit of a stretch!

anyway, my point is that you and i think of “proof” from an implicit or explicit metaphysical background that simply did not exist in the first century.

Far more important to the authors of the constituent works that are now codified into bibles was an exploration of the nature of god, and what that should tell us about how to live well, simply given as an axiom that god exists (or, that god is that by which existence is itself able to be, but let’s not get too fancy!)

Genesis, for example, is not really concerned about “how” the world came to be; it is very, very concerned with grappling with what the right ways to participate in creation are.

Fair points. But I think that John was intended as a proof in the sense of "here is sufficient evidence for you to believe that this is true". It pretty explicitly says so.

I didn't understand your first sentence?

I had to guess at what "book of john" was, and i went with the obscure answer :)

There's the gospel according to john, which is the fourth, and non-synoptic, canonical gospel. It's what you get when you take a Hebraic metaphysical worldview and try your damned best to cram it into the heads of hellenestic (neo)platonists, which accounts for the whole Logos thing, etc. And even when trying to speak neoplatonist, the author(s) of john can't resist falling back on revelatory rhetoric.

There's the revelation to john, which i, at least, (as a preterist) think is a survival guide to not getting crucified more than anything else.

and then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaean_Book_of_John , which i don't know anything about at all. If it does structure itself like a proof, i'd be very surprised.

I don’t see why that should happen since Christians think the Bible contains (for the time) careful documentation of Jesus’ supernatural birth and resurrection.

in modern times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Shelby_Spong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar

https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/how-can-the-bible-be-aut...

and again, the phrasing 'careful documentation' is anachronistic at best. We moderns, most of us, do not really know what to do with revelatory narrative. Or midrash. The synoptic gospels contradict each other in a myriad of ways about seemingly the most basic of facts; plenty of adherents are totally fine with this because it is quite clear that there are other rhetorical games afoot than "write down what happened just like a police report" style of historical recording.

I appreciate the links and response.

"According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church." [0]

[0] http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/para/115.htm

Without trying to be snarky, in my opinion that's a rather naive view of the Bible, in particular. The book forms a coherent whole with vast layers of meaning, story, interpretation and self-reference.

Unfortunately the biblical literalists of some evangelical movements don't do it justice, and they get considerably more airtime than the people who take longer to explain things.

So, you don't really think there is an invisible, almighty, sentient being that rules everything in the known universe, with a varying over time definition of "known"? And what would be the "naive view"? Assuming that the Bible is stating that such a being exists?

The Bible is an account, written over thousands of years, of people's attempts to understand God. Parts of it are impenetrable unless you're on that journey yourself. What goes wrong is when people cherry-pick bits of it out of context: Shellfish, sexual mores, etc.

In a time without modern refrigeration, they may have been onto something with the shellfish.

Or the avoidance of pork- it’s distressingly easy to pick up parasites from consuming pork.

Only if you feed the pigs carrion and under cook it. There was a big trichinosis issue in the mid-20th century, which is when some people speculated on its connection to religious pork taboos, but nobody really takes that idea seriously any more.

You act like that is the only possible infectious agent. In addition to Trichinosis, Taenia solium and Toxoplasma gondii are also spread in undercooked pork- and those are modern health concerns. The animal eats almost anything and is capable of spreading more diseases than worms. It is no wonder it would be considered ‘unclean’ given the rudimentary cleansing rituals of the Old Testament Jews.

> with a varying over time definition of "known"

This is called progressive revelation[0].

> what would be the "naive view"

That the Bible is no different than, say, the Aeneid, or the Odyssey, or any other epic saga whose purpose is to provide a myth (in the literary sense) as an explanation for why things are, though are not tied to history explicitly.

> Assuming that the Bible is stating that such a being exists?

The Bible makes clear and explicit claims about its author, where creation came from, how and why humanity exists, as well as its ultimate end.

People often criticize those who hold to a Biblical faith as people trust in some "invisible, almighty, sentient being" yet themselves don't actually have any real answers to any of the most basic questions of creation and human existence.

[0]: https://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/don_stewart_...

> or any other epic saga whose purpose is to provide a myth (in the literary sense)

Saga is an Old Norse word meaning "what is said," borrowed by English-speaking Old Norse scholars to refer to Old Norse narratives. The Aeneid is an epic poem written in Latin by Virgil around 25BC, give or take. The Odyssey is an epic poem written in ancient or Homeric Greek by a single author around the 8th or 7th century BC. The Bible could not be more different, being an anthology of writings of many different forms and many different languages by many different authors composing across the span of nearly a millennia.

> The Bible makes clear and explicit claims about its author

Please provide two examples from the Bible of clear and explicit claims about it's "author"

> Please provide two examples from the Bible of clear and explicit claims about it's "author"

Not the op but here are some claims made by the Bible about its origin.

2 Tim 3:16 "All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial for teaching, for reproving, for setting things straight, for disciplining in righteousness"

2 peter 1:20-21 "20 For you know this first, that no prophecy of Scripture springs from any private interpretation. 21 For prophecy was at no time brought by man’s will, but men spoke from God as they were moved by holy spirit."

Exodus 34:27 "27 Jehovah went on to say to Moses: “You are to write down these words, because in accordance with these words, I am making a covenant with you and with Israel.”

The Bible does mention that it's been written under divine inspiration at God's request. By the hand of men, but motivated and helped by holy spirit, as the scriptures say.

If interested, have a look at some of the frequently asked questions about the Bible that the Bible answers itself. This website uses only the Bible itself to answer questions about the Bible, which is a refreshing take.

jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/about-the-bible

I'm sure you'll find it informative.

> The Bible does mention that it's been written under divine inspiration at God's request. By the hand of men, but motivated and helped by holy spirit, as the scriptures say.

I appreciate the effort, but none of your citations are examples of "clear and explicit claims about the author," but instead are either existential claims or explanations of the unnamed authors' inspiration. What were looking for is something of the form "I, Sparticus, wrote this..." or some such.

> If interested, have a look at

Here is some quid pro quo, granted it is only a wikipedia article, but it brings together the work in summary of a vast number of biblical scholars in an easy to read table form and is quite refreshing for it's stark honesty and well-supported veracity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible

I suppose if an explicit declaration of authorship is the only thing acceptable to you then you could always see the opening statements of many of the Bible's books. They're quite clear about who composed their contents.

Nehemiah 1:1 "The words of Nehemiah..."

Isaiah 1:1 "The visions of Isaiah..."

Joel 1:1 "The word of Jehovah came to Joel..."

But most Bible writers acknowledged that they wrote in the name of Jehovah, the God of the Bible, and that they were guided by him.

Some of the many examples: Amos 1:1 "The words of Amos..." then Amos 1:3 "This is what Jehovah says..."

Micah 1:1 "The word of Jehovah that came to Micah" then Micah 2:3 "Therefore this is what Jehovah says:..."

Nahum 1:1 "A pronouncement against ninevah: The book of the visions of Nahum..." then Naham 1:12 "This is what Jehovah says:..."

If its true that as they say, they're all receiving instructions from the same source (God), then the author of the Bible's message is God, not the 40 men who were used to write it over 1600 years in their own styles.

Of course you'd have to believe that were true, and I'd contend that there are good reasons to. On the site I linked before, there are some good resources for anybody interested in learning about what the Bible actually teaches and how to apply its wisdom to make your life better. Speaking from personal experience, it works, it's quite incredible.

> The Bible could not be more different

I agree. However, that doesn't stop some people from simplifying it to something along those lines.

> Please provide two examples from the Bible of clear and explicit claims about it's "author"

It's hard to proof-text this because the entire bible is to be taken as a whole. The NT quotes the OT and the OT is further revealed by the NT. But, here you go:

- Matt 22:31 - "have you not read what was said to you by God:" (and then quotes Exodus 3:6.

It is very clear that the readers of we call the OT would have understood that what was recorded was effectively "God speaking." The entire Pentateuch + Prophets is filled God speaking to various people.

- 2 Peter 1:21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

Simply affirming what we already would already know.

- John 5:39, 46 - "You search the Scriptures...it is they that bear witness about me," ... "for [Moses] wrote of me."

> being an anthology of writings of many different forms and many different languages by many different authors composing across the span of nearly a millennia

It had many writers, but a single author and all of those writers had a singular focus: Jesus, the Son of God.

> The book forms a coherent whole

I think when perhaps in isolation, some of the individual books may be coherent, but as a whole, there is no logical consistency, but instead there are a myriad of contradictions, such as those between the synoptic gospels and John. For example, on what day was Jesus crucified? John does not agree with the synoptic gospels regarding this. Or in the Old Testament, in Exodus, we have two entirely different sets of Ten Commandments, the first we find familiar, but were destroyed, and the second set that few would recognize that Exodus specifically refers to as the Ten Commandments, including a prohibition on boiling a young goat in it's mother's milk. Is God El, or Yahweh? Is God a perfect being, or subject to all too human emotions like jealousy?

I am nearly certain the Bible was never intended to be coherent. It's authors span nearly a millennia, and it is doubtful they expected or intended their writings to be translated and compiled together by St. Jerome or the First Council of Nicaea. Joseph Campbell, a Jungian, stated "a mythic dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground which is the support of our conscious lives, and the myth is the society's dream," that a dream is a private mythology, and mythology is the public dream, and as easy it is to understand what he means, not even that is coherent.

Contradictions are sometimes the key to understanding deeper concepts and connections that are not immediately clear or "logical". Also, the Synoptic Gospels were written first, and intended to be used to catechize new Christians and teach them the basics of the life of Jesus Christ. The Gospel According to John was intended to be used to teach newly baptized Christians what it means to be a Christian and what it means to have a mystical relationship with Christ. To say "they don't agree so they're all wrong" is a very simplistic and dismissive take. John probably had the Gospels of Matthew and Luke when he wrote his own account of the Gospel, so if there are contradictions MAYBE they're intentional and are intended to teach you something.

But if you are hung up on how much smarter you are than traditional people, you will never get over how apparently dumb they were for contradicting each other.

> Contradictions are sometimes the key to understanding deeper concepts and connections that are not immediately clear or "logical".

Fascinating. Can you provide one single example from the Bible where a contradiction is intentionally employed to unveil a deeper concept or connection that is not immediately clear?

> Also, the Synoptic Gospels were written first, and intended to be used to catechize new Christians and teach them the basics of the life of Jesus Christ. The Gospel According to John was intended to be used to teach newly baptized Christians what it means to be a Christian and what it means to have a mystical relationship with Christ.

The author of John's Gospel sourced from a "signs" gospel, possibly the Gospel of Thomas, and seems to have known about Gospels Mark and Luke, but not Matthew, as well as Jewish scripture and non-Jewish sources, such as Greek philosophy. The Johannine community were messianic Jews excommunicated from the Jewish community on account of their belief that Jesus was the Jewish messiah.

> To say "they don't agree so they're all wrong" is a very simplistic and dismissive take.

Unless such a claim was made, this is a straw man.

I disagreed with OP's claim that the Bible is coherent, because it could not possibly be coherent, and I explained why. Is it necessary that the Bible be coherent? I'd like to know why, because it isn't, and it can not be, because it literally is not possible for it to have been intended to be coherent, mostly due to it being a collection of works from multiple ancient authors that lived in different centuries.

> But if you are hung up on how much smarter you are than traditional people, you will never get over how apparently dumb they were for contradicting each other.

Another straw man and an ad hominem. Your argument is twice fallacious.

> Is God El, or Yahweh?

Is your name Doctor, Father, General, Mr., George, or Maursault?

People can have more than one title which is used as a name. It's the same with God, the different names denote different aspects.

I don't know if Christianity does this, but Judaism associates each name with a different attribute. For example: mercy, justice, creation, compassion, etc.

By knowing which name is used, i.e. which attribute is being expressed, you gain a whole new insight when reading the stories on what's going on.

It's a real shame that most English translations do not preserve this information.

That works for the various epithets, but El and Yahweh seem to be conflicting proper names. i.e. is your name Robert or George?

> but El and Yahweh seem to be conflicting proper names

They don't. I'm not really sure where you get that idea from.

I read the original in Hebrew routinely and I don't get that sense at all that they conflict.

I mean just look at Exodus 6:3, were God explicitly says that he has more than one name.

Ya conflicting is maybe not the right word. Obviously within the narrative as a whole it's one god. I guess I'm trying to point out they were historically separate deities, so it's more like being called both Robert and George, rather than Dr. and Mr.

In fact, they were proper names of different deities. Unlike El, Yahweh was envisioned as a storm god in the early literature, one among many Canaanite gods and goddesses including El, Asherah and Baal. Eventually, Yahweh and El were conflated, and became chief among gods. But Yahweh/El was not the only god worshiped, not until Elijah rose to prominence. For a very long time, Yahweh/El was not the only God, just the only one that had any sympathy for the Israelites.

Yah, I read the same Wikipedia article, but if you dig into the details the actual evidence for this is so flimsy as to be almost non-existent.

There's not a lot of independent records from back then, so archeologists try to create stories from whatever they have, starting from the assumption that the religious text is wrong, and then creating a narrative from there.

If you don't use "religious text inaccurate" as your initial assumption then there's basically no evidence for this theory.

It doesn't help that they conflate Canaanites and Israelites so what one does is attributed to the other. However if you assume the Bible is correct and they are different people, with the Israelites railing against the practices of the Canaanites then the entire pantheism argument evaporates.

Wiki seems to mostly cite books by a Mark S. Smith on this topic, who seems to be a professor of Biblical Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm not sure you could characterize him as an archaeologist inventing a narrative from the starting position of "Bible wrong".

I think "El" is just the word for God, not a proper name? So it's like "Doctor" vs "George", not "Robert" vs "George".

Logical consistency wasn't the way I meant that it coheres!

The themes, arcs, symbolism, prophecies, moral structures, deeper messages, all of that stuff.

God, by definition, defies human understanding. In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas, the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.

There's plenty of history in there too, of course. Often seen from different perspectives.

> Logical consistency wasn't the way I meant that it coheres! The themes, arcs, symbolism, prophecies, moral structures, deeper messages, all of that stuff.

Though your argument is unconvincing, I still disagree, because now you are employing syllogism. The Bible is an anthological compilation of sacred literature of radically different genres, connected only by belief that they are revelations of God.

> God, by definition, defies human understanding.

Stop me when I get to anything that defies your understanding: by God, you mean the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority, the supreme being who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Or perhaps you are referring to Jesus of Nazareth, the notorious Cynic philosopher, poet and rebel Jew that dared to suggest loving one's enemy, who knocked over tables and caused a commotion at the Temple in Jerusalem, passed bread while saying, "do this in memory of me," and was crucified. I think I know what you're getting at, but, in fact, most ordinary people defy human understanding.

> In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas,

I think you must mean Buddhists.

> the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.

Is there any other written work that does not work with more than just literal interpretation? Isn't that true of everything that has ever been written?

> I think you must mean Buddhists.

No, I mean Zen people. This includes Zen Buddhists.

> Is there any other written work that does not work with more than just literal interpretation? Isn't that true of everything that has ever been written?

https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

> Stop me when I get to anything that defies your understanding...most ordinary people defy human understanding

Quite true. Another argument in favour of religion, at least as a starting point. I don't think we're going to make much progress here. Perhaps a long conversation over several glasses of wine, but not on the Internet.

>God, by definition, defies human understanding.

There are many statements in the Bible that God is "beyond understanding" but when God shows up he seems cut from similar cloth as every other ancient sky-father deity, which is to say mercurial, violent and authoritarian (as expected of authority figures of the time) but still comprehensibly human.

It's written like that a lot in the Old Testament.

But the universe is absurd, isn't it? I mean, look at yourself, where you're sat, what's going on. It's crazy, and yet it has meaning. And if you spend a while contemplating the fact that the source of the universe must be beyond the confines of space and time, I think that's ample material to get started with.

The Bible is an remarkable book, but the more amazing thing is that the whole shebang is immediately accessible to you right now, just by virtue of the fact that you exist and you're reading this.

>And if you spend a while contemplating the fact that the source of the universe must be beyond the confines of space and time, I think that's ample material to get started with.

You or others may read the Bible and find some sense of a God beyond those confines in its pages, but I find that God to be depressingly limited in that regard. The God of the Bible is the God of tribesmen who hadn't even smelted iron, a God that demands blood sacrifice and plunder, not the being who crafted the meticulous balance of universal constants, relativity or quantum mechanics. The God of the Bible is small compared to what we now understand of the universe.

Seven days of Genesis isn't crazy. Evolution is crazy. Hundreds of thousands of years of struggle from small, scared primates to sentient apex predators that invent language, civilization and technology and discuss the nature of divinity over the internet is crazy. A fish with its own windshield[0] is crazy. The vast majority of the universe being void and most of the rest being something we can only call "dark matter" because we don't really understand it is crazy. Black holes and pulsars and the Great Attractor are crazy. The Higgs field is crazy.

>The Bible is an remarkable book, but the more amazing thing is that the whole shebang is immediately accessible to you right now, just by virtue of the fact that you exist and you're reading this.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist family with Pentecostal friends and relatives in the Bible Belt. Trust me, I've read the Bible. But to metaquote Douglas Adams, it's enough for me to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe faeries dwell at the bottom of it.

I like the Bible as a work of literature, poetry, philosophy and even moral teaching (disregarding the Apostle Paul's misogyny, and the OT in its entirety, and see George Carlin's bit for my opinion of the Ten Commandments[1].) but as far as its depiction of God goes, it's just one culture's set of evolving opinions, out of hundreds if not thousands or more. It has its value from an anthropological and cultural perspective, but no more or less so than any other.

[0]https://www.mbari.org/barreleye-fish-with-tubular-eyes-and-t...

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk81tUUhRig

>The book forms a coherent whole

In order to derive meaning from your statement, I think it's logically necessary to imagine a counterfactual where it doesn't form a coherent whole.

If you think the Bible is coherent, can you explain what it would be like if it were incoherent?

I'm putting it this way because I think it's probably useless to try to argue directly whether it's coherent.

And then there will be nothing on earth greater or more worthy of fear than big daddy government :). Sounds like utopia to me! lmao

If I say I one day hope atheism is just an interesting footnote in history, would I get the same response as your statement?

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