Thursday, March 21, 2013

Atheist Intellectual Dishonesty 101

Here's another popular picture Village Atheists are posting all over the internet:


Now let's talk about what the author of this cute little pic failed to mention:

1. There are no original manuscripts for most of the works of ancient Western antiquity, including the Greek Philosophers and the Roman Historians.

2. Some of the oldest New Testament manuscripts are dated to the 2nd Century. A recently discovered fragment of the Gospel of Mark has been dated to the 1st Century (right after the Crucifixion).

3. 75% of the King James Edition of the Bible is actually based on the work of William Tyndale, who was one of the most gifted scholars that ever lived. 

3. The reason the King James Translation didn't use the most ancient texts and papyri is because most of them hadn't been discovered, yet. Modern comparisons of the King James version to these older manuscripts show that the Authorized Version is still one of the best English Bibles. The existing codexes that Tyndale, and later the King James team relied on, were good copies of the earlier texts.

4. There are more like 5700 ancient texts (not 8000), and the reason they're not all alike are due to differences in spelling some words, copyist errors in punctuation, or the omission of some words (because copyists usually duplicated texts that were in poor condition).

Dr. Craig Blomberg, Bible Scholar at the Denver Seminary, sums up the majority of the differences:

"The vast majority of these variants involve variant spellings of words that do not affect meaning whatsoever (and the largest percentage of spelling variants involve words with a movable nu at their end—i.e., they can be spelled with or without the Greek letter for the n sound).  Huge numbers of variants also involve the accidental omission of a letter or duplication of a letter or omission of a word or inversion of word order of two or three words or improvement of syntax, style, grammar or diction, where it is easy to determine what the original reading was."


Dr. Blomberg's blog post on this subject can be found here:

http://www.denverseminary.edu/craig-blombergs-blog-new-testament-musings/400000-textual-variants-in-the-new-testament-alone/



In fact, the large number of surviving texts means there are plenty to compare each other to, which makes it easier to weed out mistakes and determine what the originals most likely contained.

This is a far cry from being "contradictory". In fact, when you omit these known differences, the actual number of questionable variants between texts is surprisingly small, and no Orthodox Christian doctrinal issue is in question. Any good Study Bible makes note of these variants in the footnotes sections.

This little criticism from the Village Atheist crowd proves once more that ignorance is contagious, especially on the internet, where few Atheists contend the veracity of what other Atheists post online.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Yes, Hyberbole Can Be Fun!

....Especially if you're a Village Atheist. Here's what one posted online:


A scientist will read thousands of books in his lifetime but still think he has alot (sic) more to learn...

A religious person will barley read one book and think they know it all...


Gee, I wonder if this guy ever heard of a Christian book store? Christians encourage reading, in fact, Christians encourage a LOT of reading.

What would be really refreshing is if more Atheists actually READ the Bible before lecturing the rest of us on what is contained within it. Although Atheists love to claim that they are more familiar with the Bible than the rest of us, it's obvious through the ignorant comments they make that they really aren't.

More's the pity.



Sunday, March 3, 2013

Pretzel Logic Debunked... Again

Here's what happens when a Village Atheist throws a bunch of non-related concepts into the intellectual blender:

Copied from the Craigslist Religion Forum:

Christianity debunked in 3 easy lessons:

1. What sort of good parent would punish their children the way God did for a simple act of disobedience encouraged by an older and wiser being (Satan). The other explanation is that they ate from the tree of knowledge and this made them mortal humans, But that is simply symbolic of the period when Apes' minds evolved into human minds. Nothing to do with Christianity.

Why would Genesis, a book that described the creation of man in a single one of God's days, allude to the evolution of apes to men? Adam and Eve were humans, not apes. There is nothing in the Genesis account that points to the evolution of thought. Eve was deceived by a serpent and then she convinced Adam to join her in disobedience. That's it. Nothing else is inferred.

2. What sort of good God would murder EVERY life form on the planet except the ones on Noah's ark? And even IF Noah was the only good man on Earth, why save his family? The Ark could have only housed 700 pairs of animals at most if they took the young and smallest. And the people would have had trouble keeping up with just cleaning and feeding of them. At LEAST 4000 pairs would have been need to produce the diversity we have now. Common sense tells us we are all not decendents of Noah.

Problem #1: killing an animal isn't murder unless you're some extremist animal rights activist.

The issue is, the The Great Flood was a supernatural event ordered by a sueprnatural being. The purpose of The Flood was to destroy evil humans, not animals. If God is able to flood and teh dry out the Earth, then he's able to restore human and animal diversity. Also, Noah saved only land based creatures. Obviously most aquatic creatures had nothing to fear from The Flood. The only argument worth putting up is either that The Flood occurred or it didn't. mental wrangling is useless here and proves nothing.

3. Jesus was supposed to be the PERFECT sacrifice. Putting aside the concept that a blood sacrifice accomplishes nothing and is just an ancient superstition; IF the Jesus sacrifice were perfect, humanity would have been immediately returned to paradise. So either Jesus wasn't perfect or the mythological "carrot" of a future return was held out by preachers in order to gain a following.

The Atheist here needs to read the Bible before lecturing on it.

Jesus was the perfect sacrifice because He ended all need for animal sacrifice, which was only a shadow of the Ultimate Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. I f animal sacrifice was useless, then YHWH wouldn't have ordered it and set specific guidelines for sacrifices.

There is nothing in the Bible that even suggests that the Sacrifice of Jesus should return man to his immortal perfect state. before the fall of man, man had committed no sin. Only sinless beings can be perfect beings. Jesus died to save man from the sins men commit. As such, men are not perfect and perfection was not restored simply through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Atheists need to read the Bible in whole passages, in context, and then argue against the Bible on its own merits, versus cherry-picking and throwing red herrings into the argument.

I always get a laugh when someone like this 'debunks' Christianity in 'easy steps', then trips over their own toes after making a condescending entry.

'Nuff said.