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He's not just like "LOL ITS RAINING BIBLES."  He used his influence to GET OTHER PEOPLE TO WRITE THE FIRST BIBLE; and since then He has got several other people to reproduce and translate Bibles.


not gonna answer the rest because you're clearly trolling

Is there a "first" bible? I thought it was a collection of various books, written by different people who had never met, during different lifetimes (centuries apart), in a mix of languages/dialects. If that's the case then why isn't the bible still being added to today? Why did they stop adding to it when they did? Surely some new gospel can add the missing section on dinosaurs and quantum entanglement.

GenesisX wrote on 02/13/11 at 02:24:46:


Evidence that he didn't?

AlexPenev wrote on 02/12/11 at 08:50:17:


Where did you hear this, Alex? I had always thought that the gospels were all written between 60-120 AD, at least that's what I learned in college. One of the first gospels was the Gospel of Thomas, which is just a bunch of teachings of Jesus, and the four known gospels actually referred to this one. Matthew wrote his gospel around 60-70 AD, and he was a disciple of Jesus, hardly a fifth-hand account. John was also a disciple, but he wrote his around 100 AD. Luke and Mark did not know Jesus, but they interviewed disciples. Luke referred to Paul (who wasn't a disciple, so that's like a third-hand account), and Mark referred to Peter (who was a disciple).

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He sinned too much, so he doesn't get healed? Man Sword, you hang out with some unusual people. I have never reasoned this way, nor have I heard anybody I know use this reasoning. It's pretty sad to hear it actually.
TBH, this is a troubling issue among Christians, actually. I remember reading an article where these parents had a child that was diabetic, and his blood sugar got way too high (or was it low, anyway, it was bad). Friends and neighbors urged the mom and dad to take him to a hospital, but they said that God would heal him if it was his will. They refused to get him treatment because they thought God would perform some miracle, and the kid died. The parents were charged with neglect, but I don't know what happened to them... If I were one of the neighbors in this situation, I would tell the person that God works by giving doctors the ability to learn about the human body and be able to treat illnesses. (This theory actually is met with hostility because it supports SCIENCE, lol.) So to your question, I would say that an amputee will never regrow his legs (and God can't regrow them for him), but we as humans have been able to gain the technology for prosthetics, and in the future we may be able to have transplants of any limb or body part.

Now, I know what you're going to say... God doesn't give us knowledge, we get it through studying and experimenting (science). I do not have a comeback for this statement. It goes back to what you believe in -- creation or evolution (or somewhere in between).

The teenage cousin story... You seem to almost blame God for these kinds of things happening. The reality is, they happen, and it's sad and unfortunate. I must say that I cannot empathize with you, because I have never lost a family member at such a young age. I have experienced very close friends passing away as teenagers, but I know it's not the same. But the point I'm trying to make is that God doesn't control everything that happens in this world. We want it so that he makes everything good so there's no death in the world and there's no evil, but that isn't so. While Christians believe in God, we also believe that Satan exists too. And that's how we conveniently explain the presence of evil in the world. It may seem like a cop-out, but my tiny brain can't explain it much more.

That's why I see God the way Futurama explained him. If he does too much, people become reliant on him, if he does nothing, people lose faith. When he does things right, people don't know that he's done anything at all.

why didn't the neighbors just call an ambulance?

and if the kid was low then he could have just eaten some candy or something.

Sucks he was born to those parents though, expecting god to heal him. That is so dumb. Even if you believe in God most people don't just sit their waiting for god to be their bitch.

Hopefully his parents went to jail for awhile for being retarded.

to answer Sword; being completely altruistic isn't a virtue, nor is it considered "good" in any part of Christian philosophy, or any world philosophy for that matter.

The story is still really tragic; my condolences.

Michael F wrote on 02/12/11 at 12:56:59:


If you even saw my back, you would shine like the sun for like months. Can you imagine what would happen to you if you saw me in the TV's reflection?  

Btw, at that one dude that made fun of my post count, the point was the fact that I am a "myth".  

Someone lock and delete this thread.  It's honestly embarrassing for the whole community.

Dan H wrote on 02/14/11 at 09:57:07:

Oh, he may truly have existed but perhaps he just wasn't very remarkable, hence why he wasn't written about. Maybe he was a nice guy and preacher and all, but just not very magical. That would explain why he was largely ignored during his lifetime. If, decades after he died, someone started attributing magical properties to him, then he might have started receiving more attention. Makes sense.

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We can't know anything since they're long dead. There may be other motivations, or maybe there was a way to make money from it. Who knows.

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The idea was introduced sometime around the middle ages. In particular, the Gregorian Calender that we're all using was introduced by Pope Gregory. So I guess, yes, it's a church thing. Most people in those times were religious, so I don't imagine there was a problem or criticism of the dating.
Scientists use this system because it's ubiquitous. To them it doesn't really matter what the root year's event is, as long as everyone in the world is speaking the same language. The root event could have been Jesus or Caesar or the Great Pyramid or 1066 or whatever. All those produce nice small numbers and help us refer to most of the historically recorded events (positive or negative years) with small numbers.
But we'd never use "6 billion". Not only are the numbers unwieldy, but there's no way to pinpoint an accurate root. Geologists say earth is 4.5 billion "plus minus a few hundred million" years old, so should we start at 6,000,000,000 or 6,100,000,000? And most significant events in history will fall between 5,999,995,000 and 6,000,002,011. A bit useless, really. Even with Jesus as root we don't have an accurate start. Nobody knows when he was born! Estimates go as high as 6 AD, so we're up to six years off his real birth. But either way, the numbers are small and everyone's using it. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Note that there are other calenders. It's year 5771 in the Hebrew calendar, around 4700 on the Chinese, and we're about 2 years away from the end of the Mayan one, which is supposed to reset in 2012 because it wasn't designed to count any higher.
There is also a "computer calendar". All computers count time as "seconds since 1/1/1970". The current computer time is around 1,297,000,000 seconds. This is the number you see in the URLs for each forum topic. To display dates like "2011", a computer could take the 1297etcetc, do its conversion to work out that it's been 41 years, and add 1970 to it. Some applications have trouble displaying or storing dates before 1970.

tl;dr: Jesus calendar? a churchy decision from centuries ago that stuck and there's no reason to change it.

Dan H wrote on 02/14/11 at 09:57:07:

Coming from some very intellectual individuals who recognize that, by definition, religion and science are mutually exclusive in all senses of the word.

It takes a sharp mind to acknowledge the gravity and pertinence of religious debate. I suppose such prodigies can only be found on the Mario Kart MB.

^ penev a thigh flexer??
Pfft, that's only a theory!