Dear __________,

People would like you more if you didn't try so hard. You don't have to win at everything, and you don't always have to stand out!

Love, Trev

Dear ________,

Please stop showing penis to children. It's really not cool.

Love, Trev

@NGH: I appreciate your earnest response. The information about the Jewish scribes I had heard before, but they are doubtless the strongest link in the chain, as the Torah and prophecies were passed from generation to generation. I would love to discuss this all with you in depth at some other time.

@Zechs: don't use the youtu.be link format and it'll autopost.

@NGH: I suppose that would have to be the basis of your revelation. You'd have to accept on some level that the things that define God and seem to be contradictory really aren't, on some level you just don't understand.

But questions still remain -- which text is right? What about the translation errors? Which scribe is reliable and which isn't? Are there any books that managed to sneak into every canon that are just straight made up?

If you're hinging this all on one passage in Paul's letter to Timothy, I can assure you that he doesn't consider all of his writings to be divinely inspired as he remarks at points in his letters "This is just my opinion", so he'd probably exclude a good bit of the New Testament. What about Esther? It's not even among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Are the inaccuracies about the stay of the Israelites in Egypt divinely inspired? Are the dicked up genealogies divinely inspired? Are the historical inaccuracies about the Romans divinely inspired? How did the post-Chaldean revisionism affect the texts? What about the church councils? What about the Anabaptist agenda?

Maybe there's truth in it all. But historical evidence tells me that book is not 100% accurate cover-to-cover in any canon or translation. I spent a good year in university even after my Fundamentalist education grappling with the weight of the Bible, and at the end of it all I left even more confused and dejected. It only started to make sense when I rejected the infallibility hypothesis.

@DarkChaplain: I blame the Emperor.

@Ashkachan: Hate speech will not be tolerated on this forum.

Enjoy your ban.

I kind of leave God out of my whole explanation, because, you know, Epicurus' dilemma and theological noncognitivism and all that. But I do find the idea that free will exists but is bound by the deterministic laws of physics an interesting one -- the idea that our actions are predetermined by how we are physiologically wired, and yet to us, in our finite sphere of understanding, they are simultaneously very much our choice.

As for how apologetics address the existence of dinosaurs, I went to Bob Jones Academy, the high school run by the world's foremost Fundamentalist Protestant university. Their explanation was that fossils are formed primarily by the global flood, and that the earth fundamentally changed in such a way that the few (doubtless ceremonially unclean, so maybe only two?) dinosaurs left could not survive.

If you haven't already, click on the link about Epicurus' Dilemma and read the following:

This is only a dilemma for a philosopher who tries to know God through human knowledge and epistomological observation, which is idolatry. For the true theologian, God transcends the transcendent and cannot be known but by revelation that starts with faith and ends with union.

So... human knowledge is too limited to define God. So we get no definition of God.

So God can be anything I damn well please? Or nothing at all? How do I know it's this guy's version, or that guy's? Or maybe you're both wrong? Or maybe you're both right? Or maybe no one is?

How else do we know anything? If people believe that they are not smart enough to really, truly know the truth, then they'll believe anything you shovel them.

I suppose that's where faith comes in. You'll pardon me for not having much of it.

@Ecstasy: Dreams where teeth are falling out are the most common. Maybe since you have so many piercings, it's triggered by the same thing?

Fascinating stuff. Remind me to call you guys when I eventually make a thread about atheism and Pascal's wager.