"Bible fanatics" is a little insulting to several religions. Anyway a lot of things that look like they took a lot of time (I think the Grand Canyon is the canonical example) are alternatively explained as being results of the Flood.
That is not remotely plausible. I'll admit I am a little aggravated, but I'm not going to climb up on my high-horse and lecture you. This is already way off-topic and if you were interested you could easily find the information on your own.
I will just say that if you believe in God and miracles then you don't need an alternative explanation for the Grand Canyon (or anything else since God can do anything). So lets not needlessly force the religious history pieces into the science puzzle.
Not at all. Here's a crude thought experiment: suppose you believed in a God who performed confirmed miracles, but who had only performed two or three in recorded history. Now suppose you lost your wallet and spent five minutes looking for it, without success. Would it be rationally responsible, at that point, to ascribe its disappearance to divine intervention?
How long and how hard would you have to look before that even made it onto the list of hypotheses?
Just because God can do anything doesn't mean that's always a good explanation.
In fact, to a naive observer, secularists are kind of in the same boat. Bear with me for a moment:
There's an intelligent design argument that says the laws of physics for this universe are extremely fine-tuned; change any number of physical constants by even a small amount, and the universe never develops stars.
The response to that goes, this is just the one universe we can see; there may be many others with different constants. And while this particular setup might be improbable, it's what we have to see in order to be here.
The response to that goes, if you can go invoking a practically infinite number of unseen universes, what's the point of trying to explain anything? Invoke a few more universes, and you could write anything off as chance.
And the response to that goes, roughly, well, you don't want to ascribe things to once-in-a-multiverse events unless you've looked really hard first (like we have with the cosmology stuff).
See? We're kind of in the same boat.
The reality--getting back to miracles--isn't anything like that simple; there is a great diversity of opinion in Christendom about how often God performs miracles, and when, and how you can tell he's done it. But as far as I can tell, they agree on two things: (1) The miracle has to make theological sense (there's usually an obvious reason for it), and (2) It doesn't happen anything like often enough to threaten the effectiveness of science.
Though there are folks who will claim God could have created dinosaur fossils just to test our faith, this is very much a fringe view. Most theologians would be very uncomfortable with the idea that God has behaved in a scientifically deceptive way. Quite the opposite; the entire well-accepted realm of natural theology is based on the idea that God has set up the world to make sense and to be investigated and even to teach us things. If there were evidence to the contrary, it would be profoundly upsetting for a lot of scholars.
The Catholics use the KJV with the Apocrypha inserted between the OT and NT. Most of the denominational churches (loosely what you referred to as Protestants) use similar bibles unless you want to be picky over their use of different translations or get into which original manuscript they were translated from. And that's just getting warmed up. I'm into this stuff.
The term "apocrypha" is one only used by Protestants, as a pejorative term for the books Luther excised from the Septuagint, the Old Testament used by Jesus and the Apostles. The non-pejorative term is "deuterocanonicals", so-called because they were canonized later than the Old Testament books Luther accepted. Notably, Luther also excluded four New Testament books from his canon: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, and Revelation. I suppose he found sola fide a lot easier to defend when he didn't have to contend with James' "So you see that a man is justified by works, not by faith." The Reformation didn't follow Luther's lead on the New Testament, though, and that's why Protestant Bibles have 66 books, not 62.
I'd suggest a little more warm up :) Some of us were really into this stuff before departing the faith.
Sorry you departed the faith. Perhaps, you should have been really, really into this stuff? :-)
You can read more details at http:?/epistemicfaithcrisis.wordpress.com/ if you're interested.
Specifically: Jewish scripture consists of what is called the "Tanakh" [0], which is the same content as the Protestant Old Testament but in a different order. The Tanakh tells the history of the Jewish people from "origins" to around 500 BC.
Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox scripture (generally called "the Bible") consist of everything in the Tanakh, in this case called the "Old Testament", plus the "New Testament" which tells the story of Jesus and his first generation of followers. Additionally, Catholics and Orthodox include other Jewish writings (pre-Jesus) which mostly fill in the gaps between the two narratives [1]. A number of other post-Jesus writings (such as letters written by early Christians, which tell the history of the next generation of the church) are sometimes included as additional reference material.
(As a brief aside: among Protestants in particular, there's a tendency to use different "translations" which consist of the same material but use different vocabulary and sentence structure. Generally speaking, which translation is used matters only for doctrinal edge cases.)
Mormon scripture consists of the Protestant Old and New Testaments, usually the King James translation, as well as three additional books collectively called the Standard Works [2]. The "Book of Mormon" tells the history of the inhabitants of the Americas. "Doctrine and Covenants" contains official teachings of Mormon leaders, who are considered to be modern-day prophets. "Pearl of Great Price" is kind of a grab bag, consisting of everything from revisions of other parts of the Bible to the controversial "book of Abraham" [3] to the life of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. In addition, Mormons consider their president and his 12 closest advisers to be "prophets, seers, and revelators" [4] whose teachings are more important than scripture.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanakh
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Canon#Canons_of_various_C...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_works
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Abraham - LDS founder Joseph Smith claims this tells the story of Abraham; Egyptologists say it has nothing to do with Abraham.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet,_seer,_and_revelator
Don't be so sensitive. I said "slightly", but it is definitely belittling.
edited for clarity
militant |ˈmilətənt| adjective combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause, and typically favoring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods: a militant nationalist.
The crusades are probably smaller, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of world population, than you realized.
I'm not sure how many of those events you can officially put down to atheism, but the death toll from officially atheist states alone--e.g., the USSR--are pretty bad. My reading is that religiously motivated manmade disasters are a blip compared to the secularly motivated ones. Your reading may vary, though. :)
When there are difficult or tragic circumstances and we believers speak up to try to help or encourage, we get voted up, but the rest of the time, we get downvotes and negative responses.
Comments about religious history (especially with sources) or religious artifacts (like manuscripts), clear explanations of interesting doctrines, and descriptions of how different religions/sects view some particular issue tend to be pretty well received. As a religious person, I've made a lot of comments along these lines (some about my own religion, some about other religions) and gotten a lot more upvotes than downvotes for them. Even the negative responses I get are thoughtful most of the time.
Assertions that religion X is true/false, statements that aren't backed up by appropriate evidence, and preachy comments tend to be poorly received.
Some conversations have gone well, but there are more that have not. Most likely my own fault for calling people on their intolerance rather than just shrugging and finding another story to comment on. :-)
But HN members do like to learn new and interesting things, even from foreign worldviews. If the idea of "speaking in tongues" came up, a quick explanation of the practice and the history (especially with links) would be quite welcome.