Jun

24

It’s been said that the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia has hidden away the mysterious Ark of the Covenant, the divine container which supposedly houses the tablets of the ten commandments, the rod of Aaron, and a sample of heavenly Manna. A theory, and I use that term loosely, has been constructed suggesting that the Ark was smuggled out of Jerusalem by Menelik I, the son of King Solomon, who then settled with the Queen of Shebia in modern-day Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s royal bloodline claims to be descended from them.

The current patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Ethiopia, while meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, announced that the Ark of the Covenant would be revealed for the entire world to see.

The question remains whether or not the patriarch will allow the alleged artifact to be tested by science to at the very least verify its origin and age. Of course, one simple test that I would be more than happy to conduct myself would be to simply touch the object.

In 2 Samuel, God struck down Uzzah, a man who dared to reach out and place a hand on the Ark to prevent it from toppling over. There are also passages which tell of countless people being killed by merely looking upon the Ark, and Numbers tells Preists that if they were to look at the Ark at an improper time, it would result in immediate death.

The Patriarch is going to have a problem if people don’t immediately drop dead after viewing this glorious box, because either it isn’t the true Ark, or the Bible’s account of it is false.



Apr

12

Remember: Aim For The Head

April 12, 2009 by Brandon | 3 Comments



ZOMBIES OH NO



Apr

12

A Quick Debate

April 12, 2008 by Brandon | 3 Comments

This is a clip from a long and ongoing debate over at Differ Honestly. I just thought I’d share it because I liked my responses.

Elman wrote:

I don’t argue the Bible is objective evidence of any supernatural events, but I do argue the Bible is some historical evidence of that actual existence of the person, Jesus of Nazerath. History has not confirmed there was a mass exodus of slaves from Egypt. That you interpret to mean it is a fact that no exodus occured.

There was no Exodus. It is a story written during the factual period of the Babylonian Exile. The story emerged during this period.

There are no Egyptian records of an exodus. Strange for a culture who were known for meticulous record keeping. Why? Because it didn’t happen. There is no archaeological evidence anywhere of an exodus; there are no graves, there are no signs of any nomadic habitation, there are accounts from other sources of such a nomadic culture wandering for 40 years.

So yes, I would interpret the lack of any evidence as supporting the fact that it didn’t happen.

You cannot use the Bible as a historical document. Why? Because not everything in it is historical. Why is this significant? Because you can’t tell what is real and what is make-believe unless you have outside evidence to support the claim. That’s the only way.

Elman wrote:

You are in the great minority to say the Bible written in the second or third century is no evidence of the existence of Jesus.

No, I am not. The oldest gospel fragments known to exist date to 125 CE. The vast majority we have begin to appear more regularly around the third century. It is believed that the Quelle Gospel, or the Gospel of Q, was written around 50 CE and it predated all of the other gospels. Granted, no copies exist, but through analysis of Matthew and Luke, the Gospel can be theoretically reconstructed and given that date. Ironically, the reconstructed Q Gospel doesn’t really talk at all about Jesus’ birth, life, or even, most importantly, his death. That’s probably why the gospels conflict with the accounts of these stories.

It isn’t far fetched to think that someone, or several people, existed that the stories of Jesus were based off of, but to suggest that there was a historical Jesus, considering that the accounts of him in the Bible as well as apocryphal gospels and accounts contradict each other, is inaccurate to say the least. It is no more accurate than to say there was a historical Heracles or even King Arthur. A nice example of the disagreement of these accounts is the birth of Jesus; the Gospel of Luke dates the birth of Jesus during the Census of Quirinius, while the Gospel of Matthew places the birth at least a decade earlier. The Q Gospel doesn’t mention the birth, so it was up to the writers of Matthew and Luke to guess at it.

I really have no problem with people believing a person named Yeshua ben Yosef existed. A lot of people named Yeshua who had fathers named Yosef probably were alive during that time, given that they were some of the most common names of the period and location.

I really have no problem with people believing this particular Yeshua may have went around and preached to people. I don’t even have a problem with him claiming he was the messiah, because everyone and their goat was doing it around that time. All of this really isn’t very extraordinary. I have problems with the extraordinary claims, for which there is no evidence.

For me, though, there is no historical evidence outside of the Bible to account for this man anyway. There just isn’t. It’s not like we have a Roman census which names him. We have ancient fragments of documents written by believers who were perpetuating the belief. We do not have documents written by outside sources naming him during his life or even within the eye-witness period after his life.

The only account we may have had was of Josephus. And let’s face it, it’s a known and accepted forgery, even by Christian theologians. Even if it wasn’t a forgery and he did mention Jesus, he was born after the time Jesus would have been died, so his account isn’t an eye-witness account.

Elman wrote:

I was watching a nova last night on the history of the earth. The traced life back some 3.5 billion years. Then they said an extraordinary think. About how life began and when we simply don’t know.

And they are indeed correct. We do not know. We do, however, have a good idea, and that idea is abiogenesis.

I’m not sure what your point was. Nova saying that we don’t know how life began doesn’t justify belief in God.



Mar

25



Mar

8

I’m not sure how this story from Time flew under my radar, especially since it had a History Channel special that I also didn’t know about on March 2nd.

I don’t give the History Channel much stock at all, and if something like this is appearing on it, you can bet that it’s all pseudo-archeology. I had the pleasure of taking an archeology course, as well as nearly all of my art history courses, in college from Dr. Susan McCarter. She happens to be the wife of Dr. Kyle McCarter, who chairs the Near Eastern studies department at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Kyle McCarter took part in debunking the whole James Ossuary find, in that he helped show that the “brother of Jesus” part was actually written by a second hand at another time, meaning that it was a forgery.  Dr. Kyle McCarter also gave a lecture at my college on the ossuary, which I attended.

In any event, Dr. Susan McCarter had choice words for the History Channel and throughout her class would constantly show why you should take anything that is on it as pure entertainment. Something like this whole Ark deal.

Now I have nothing against religious artifacts being discovered, to the contrary I’m quite intrigued by it. But in this story we hit a few snags. First we are presented with an object that really doesn’t share any resemblance, in the description provided, to the Ark in the Bible. It looks more like a drum, whereas the Ark in the Bible is described as a box. Not only that, but it misses its mark by roughly 2,500 years, being dating to around 1350 AE. Oh, but wait! That’s no problem, because the tradition within the tribe, the Lemba, who claimed to be the caretakers of the Ark says the Ark destroyed itself and was rebuilt. Now we’re making some serious leaps. While I respect the fact that Tudor Parfitt, the man who is on this Ark Quest, tries to dispel the supernatural qualities of the Ark by suggesting that it was some sort of primitive, unstable cannon and that’s what all the Biblical hubbub was about it killing people, it is a conclusion based on absolute speculation.

I have no reason to think that the Jews didn’t make some sort of pretty box that they carried around as a sacred object. And that’s all it will be, if we ever do find it. Even finding it does nothing to support any supernatural claims the Bible makes, and it’s much like trying to use the historic locations in the Bible as proof that the Bible is real. No, it just proves that these people wrote about real places and maybe even real objects they worshiped.  In 1,000 years, if someone happens upon a Spiderman comic in the ruins of New York, that doesn’t prove that Spiderman was real.



What is Fractal Wrongness?

The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

  • Recent Comments

  • Visitors Online

    • 01 visitor(s) online
    • powered by WassUp