How exactly do you know this? Forget the biblical account, if the earth was formed from a molten mass of matter and slowly cooled and hardened over billions of years, how do you know that the earth was rotating at the same speed now as it did then?

You are making some pretty big assumptions to support your argument, I'm not sure you would find many astro-physicists that would say that they are certain the earth followed the same orbit and rotated at the same rate when it was formed as it does now...

if you believe that much/most of the bible is allegorical, a "day" has no rigorous temporal meaning.

Rick, men weren't on the planet when it was a molten mass of matter, which it never was according to Genesis. When men were transcribing God's Word, a day was 24 hours in length. God told the authors it was a day, and their experience dictated what a day was: evening followed by morning, 24 hours.

You can't spin it(no pun intended) any other way.

Shaun you are still making assumptions that cannot be made if we are to discuss this intelligently. First, the Bible does say that the earth was "formless and void" which sounds an awful lot like the mass of gas and dust that coalesced to form the mass we call earth. Second, you again assume that God gave man a literal time clock and that a day to God is the same as a day to man. First, the formless void of the earth could have been rotating in the completely opposite direction as it does now, or it might have not been rotating at all. Many scientists postulate that the earth's axis was MUCH different than it is now, why would other things not be different as well. If the earth was rotating at 1/1000th of the speed it does now, what would that do to the length of a day? What if it were barely rotating at all as it formed? The Bible says there was evening and morning, not "and thus there were 24 hours as Shaun84Targa will know them..."

God told the authors the story of creation in terms they could understand. It wouldn't have been much good to tell the authors that the earth was formed over 4.27 billion years...

Is this really all you have to hang your hat on? A literal 24 hours definition of a day? What about years? People in the early Bible are said to have lived for hundreds of years...are their years the same as our current Julian calendar years?

So when that tricky old Jehovah changed the languages he also changed skin color, appearances, genetics, etc? Cool!

"Daddy, why didn't Noah bring Dinosaurs on the Ark?"

"Not enough room."

"What about Unicorns?"

"They wern't paying attention when he called so they got left behind."

"So why did he let the Rattle Snakes and Black Widow Spiders on?"

"To keep the rabbit and cricket population down. Its a good lesson son, don;t let yourself get too fat, pay attention when your called and feel free to eat as much rabbit and crickets as you like..."

Rick, no.

Let's do this, imagine how Genesis was written down.

God: hey Bob, got a sec? need to tell you something. grab a pen.
Bob: sure God, what's up?
God: I want to tell you how the Earth was formed.
Bob: What's an earth?
God: Everything under your feet
Bob: What about that stuff under which the lobsters live?
God: The ocean? Yeah, that's part of the earth too. Heeey, who told you about lobsters? Don't tell anyone, but grab a cow later on and I'll show you how to make butter. Anyway, take this down, you ready?
Bob: sure am God!
God: First I made heaven & earth 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of Me was moving over the face of the waters.
Bob: are the waters the ocean? Did the lobsters try to bite you when you were over them?
God: No, no lobsters yet. And then I said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. 4 And I that the light was good; and for the heck of it, I separated the light from the darkness. 5 I called the light Day, and the darkness I called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
Bob: whoa, whoa, whoa. wait a second. let me get this down. I've got "Day" (Bob doing air quotes) and "Night", what are evening and morning, and how is Day different from day?
God: sigh. I knew I should have let Glokar create these things with his new ID machine, but hey, they're mine now. OK. When it's dark out, that's Night and the transition from light to dark is pretty much evening. When it's light out, that's Day, and the transition from Night to Day is called morning. A day is one cycle of Night and Day. Got it?
Bob: I think so. When I go to bed it's dark, I wake up later and then it's light. The time from when I wake up to when I go to sleep is 1 day, right?
God: slaps his forehead. NO, the time when you wake up until the time when you wake up, that's 1 day.
Bob: oooooooh, but how'd you do all that in 1 day?
God: I'm God. Now, onto the second day.

Both God and Man define the terminology. When God says I made this in 1 day, Man writes down that it happened from evening through morning, 1 day. Not 50 gorfnars, not 10 million years... 1 day.

Shaun you are attempting to set up a debate based on your own preconceived notions and rules about God. First you assume that God and man had some sort of Oprah Winfrey sit down and that's how Genesis was written. In fact we know little about Genesis except that it was written by Moses (who did not go by the name of Bob as far as we know). Second you require that everyone agree with your notion that the Biblical creation story is literal down to the number of hours in a day.

You are setting up a straw man argument and I'm not willing to participate in that. Now, if you would like to discuss how the Bible, creation and the scientific record may be compatible I will be happy to discuss that with you. If you, however, just want to set up your own rules of the Bible and then knock them down, perhaps Rodsrsr might be better for you.

I guess that's one way to say that the Bible is fallible.

Rick, I've read the words. I don't inject any more meaning into them than what they are.

if you don't think the Bible is literal, I'm OK with that.

Shaun if you want to look at the Bible as a literal work then there are multiple places that you can say "well, that doesn't make sense". The story of Jonah comes to mind. If you, on the other hand, look at the Bible as a mixture of allegory, literal truth, parable and history then the Bible begins to make a lot more sense.

If God were to directly dictate to man every step in the creation of the universe, the resulting book would be firstly likely over a billion pages long and secondly mostly incomprehensible even to us today with all our scientific knowledge. Thus God spoke to man in a way that man could comprehend at the time.

Again Shaun, you seem to want to set up artificial rules for interpreting the Bible and then have us all come to some sort of a straw man "ah ha" moment...are you actually interested in a discussion here or do you just want to hear yourself talk?

Rick, I haven't set up any artificial rules. the text is the text is the text. who am I, or you, to decide which parts of the Bible are literal, historical, metaphoric or allegoric or just completely fabricated?

If the Bible is the Word of God, how can you presume to inject your own interpretation into it? How can you say, "I know better. This is what God really meant." When and where and how do you decide that?

Shaun the Bible is not a static document to be interpreted only one way. The Bible is interpreted by each reader. Even the same passages can mean completely different things to you if you read them over again. I'm not sure ANY literary work is subject to only one interpretation. Shall we discuss the debates over the meaning of our Constitution which was written just over 200 years ago? People have heated debates now over what those people meant when they wrote that document, yet you expect only one interpretation of a document that is thousands of years old and has gone through multiple translations?

You seem to want some sort of single cookie cutter "authoritative" interpretation of the Bible, it doesn't exist. God works with the reader to help them understand his intentions...

I can talk about what the Bible means to me and how I interpret it. It is only my interpretation, however. Of course the beautiful thing about the Bible is that my interpretation is the one that matters since God is working through me to help me understand him better.

You have set artificial rules. The first example is your insistence that the first day in the Bible was 24 hours. You assume this because days today are 24 hours. You completely discount any notion that 1) a day to God may not be the same as a day to man, 2) that God simply "dumbed things down" so man could understand, or 3) that the earth in fact was not rotating in the same speed or possibly even direction as it rotates today and thus evening and morning could be separated by billions of years. You discount all these things while sitting back and expecting everyone else to play by your literal interpretation.

This sounds too much like a Living Constitution Rick. Any group at any time can say what the Bible, or the Constitution, means, therefore rendering it meaningless in the end.

Enter exhibit A, organized religion. Most subscribers don't really make those type of determinations on their own. They drink the flavor provided and like it.

Ah, so the Constitution is now meaningless as well. If your position is that any piece of literature, whether it be the Bible, the Constitution, the Magna Carta or a paperback book is useless unless there is a single authoritative interpretation...well then anything ever written is useless.

I'm saying that the document has meaning. Constantly reinterpreting a document like the Bible or the Constitution to fit the times, the group, the personality...whatever, renders that document meaningless.

I'm surprised you are in favor of a Living Constitution. This is how the anti-gun crowd tries to nullify the 2nd Amendment..."we don't see any militia's round here."

is the bible art? :p

Sorry Shaun, but I think you're really stretching here. Every great work is open to interpretation and reinterpretation. Otherwise it isn't relevant.

I'm not stretching at all Todd. I've adopted a position quite common here on OT.

And my position is based on the text. No reading anything extra into it. God said a day, and a man wrote it down. Everyone knows what a day is, don't they?

now you're just being obstinate. What part of allegory don't you understand?

I hope you're just trying to prove a point and don't really believe what you're saying. Not that that kind of thing ever happens on PPOT...

now you just killed my buzz.:(

Why do so many people try and set limits on the creative power of an Almighty? Some believe that God could have created the entire universe and earth, but then set limits on how long it would take for him to do so. A possible explanation is that God created the earth in a fully developed, aged state. After all, Adam was a grown man, formed from the dust upon creation. Jesus, created wine and multiplied fish that were fully aged. Its silly to presume that the Alpha Omega would be limited in this area. If we let the words of the language speak to us in accord with the context and normal definitions, without being influenced by outside ideas, than the word for day found in Genesis 1 (yom) which is qualified by a number, the phrase "evening and morning" and for Day 1 the words "light and darkness" obviously means an ordinary day. (around 24 hours)

An additional clue is the seventh day as recorded in Gen 2:1-3 Note that the seventh day is always addressed in the singular. God blessed the seventh day (not days) and made "it" (not them) holy. He than rested on the seventh day. This is the pattern for todays seven day workweek. Now read the ten commandments. Exodus 20 God made the heavens and earth in six days and rested on the seventh. We too shall work for six days and rest on the seventh. Some are suggesting that we rest for a million years?

Shaun, your buzz is back

or 5 gorfnars, same difference.

It's a Christmas miracle!

I will say taking a stance directly opposite yours is a good exercise. Even had to pull from Scalia, who BTW, believes in a thoroughly dead Constitution.

It amazes me how religious folk, when questioned about obvious blunders in the Bible, quote the same old, " that's irrelevant, it's the message that's important" line. No, it's the truth that's important imo. Without truth the message suffers.

Hmmm...
I think this is a big problem with the Bible. It was written by humans, supposedly inspired/dictated by a Holy Spirit. Humans are fallible and their motives are often suspect (see the political threads for more on this). If the Bible is touted to be the Divine word of God, who are we to 'interpret' it, taking some edicts literally while explaining others as allegorical.

The reason some of us come out to comment on these religious threads is because this stuff is REALLY important. This is not just English 101 deconstruction of a Shakespearean play. It is not my intention to mock anyone's belief, but when I am told (as I have been since childhood) that if I do not follow a particular path in life I may be damned to an eternity of lament... please excuse me while I read the fine print. This is heavy stuff, and there may be a test!!

I hope that's true. I am planning my closing argument for St Peter right now!;)

"..the TRUTH is out there."
Agent Fox Mulder

(just tryin' to keep it light)

this thread needs a few laughs..

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I think you are missing the point. If you look at the Bible as a work that was set down one time to be the end all, be all word for the rest of time then yes, it should address all things completely. That is not the fact of the Bible though. The Bible is a collection of works, some stories, some history, some letters, some gospel. All of these works were written over thousands of years. There are many texts that are not included in the Bible and in fact, the books of the Bible differ depending on if you read the Catholic or the Protestant Bible. What is a man to do!?!!?

The answer is that the Bible IS the word of God and God uses the Bible to speak to the reader. It is a tool through which God can talk to us and influence our lives. So your question about "who am I to interpret the word of God", who ELSE would you expect to interpret it for you? God wants a personal relationship with each of us, if he didn't then he would have set down a final end all, be all set of rules and been done with it.

Sure it did, back in my day...

1. Tell the truth. The Church has hidden things for years.

2. He did set rules. The ten commandments.

Again, notice the seventh creative day, the one God has rested on, is not over.
Not a 24 hour day.


Shaun, let me ask you. What is your intention on this topic?
What are you hoping to accomplish? ( serious queston )


KT

I agree with most of what you said. It is true that the Bible was penned by 40 different authors over a 1500 year period over several different continents. The Catholic Bible does indeed include the apocrypha which were not cannonized. Again, I agree with most of what you say. However, there is an absolute truth beneath the interperation. That is the problem I have with picking and choosing what parts of the Bible to believe and which ones are simply stories. It is very easy to become an authority over the scriptures. One may say that the story of Jonah never happened. If I say this than how am I to know that the ressurection was not a story as well? Who am I to decide what is fact and what is fiction? So I must believe (have faith) in the entire Bible, or none at all. There really is no middle ground. The underlying theme of the bible however, never changes....salvation.

Question: The ten commandment were part of the Mosaic Law. How many laws were there?

Bonus points: Are we under the law today?


KT

There were a zillion Mosaic laws, and no we are not under those laws today. The tearing of the veil is symbolic of this. One cannot work his way to salvation by adhearing to a set of laws.

That's totally irrelevant to me. So who decides when to change the word of God.

Oh so you Churchies can do you as you please then, as long as you repent.

I agree with you. Your position has integrity. But this is what puts believers, who also respect science, into a bind.

Whay do you say that?
You earlier tossed 'the Ten Commandments' at us.
That was only part of the law.

Was there something you wanted to add?:confused:


KT