Does anybody here have any info on the absurdities that the book of Joshua from the Bible contains? I mean, is the Sun and Moon “stopping” the only nonsense there?
Thanks.
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Of the top of my head … Joshua details the “supposed” conquest of the Holy Land …there are many inconsistencies … just for starters … the battle of Jericho… where the walls came tumbling down… pretty miraculous ? …excpet that at the time of Joshua’s supposed attack Jericho was only an undefended village … that is undefended … as in NO WALLS.
then there is the cunningly planned ambush and capture of the city of AI … miraculously planned in concert with the Almighty … so what could possibly go wrong ?
…apart from the unhelpful fact that the city of AI was a ruin at the time of Joshua’s heroics … in fact it had been an unoccupied ruin for at least a millenium.
for the rest your going to have to do your own research… I suggest you start with the “Skeptics Annotated Bible” …
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The book of Joshua is basically a fictional genocide anthology, written something like 800 years after the supposed events; imo.
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Ditto for the gospels. As I understand it, all those books were written MANY decades after (what I am generously referring to as) “The fact”. Sometimes, I can barely remember what happened just a few weeks ago, and we’re expected to believe that they were able to copy down Jesus’ sermon on the mount, word for word on scrolls at the time… ON PARCHMENT(possibly vellum)?? Somebody was really there the whole time, recording everything?
The thing is people will just hand wave away such logical inconsistencies with a simple “Oh, the will of God preserved those books with 100% accuracy!” or some such nonsense. Of course, that begs the question: Isn’t the Bible inspired by God but written by human hands? So by your own theology, God had no hand in actually writing it. It’s like Aron Ra says, God can make things humans can’t make but he can’t make things humans can make, like a boat, or a box, or a book.
Obviously, there’s nothing the least bit logical about stopping the Sun, the moon and sun being the same size, a firmament over the Earth, the fact that the bible describes the Earth as a flat disc(“The CIRCLE of the Earth”), but again, people will argue just for the sake of their sacred autodeception. It’s tragically sad to me how people do this to themselves and there’s little to nothing we can do to snap them out of it.
Thanks for the answers, guys.
That link to the Skeptics Annotated Bible interests me, thanks!!
I thought what would it say about a book like Ecclesiastes, and I made it to verse 5’s notes:
- The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. ([v.5]
Although this verse is interpreted figuratively today, it was taken literally by virtually all Christians until the Copernican revolution, and was used by the Church to condemn Galileo for teaching the heliocentric heresy.
That is one thing that certainly does “amuse” me about the bible. It’s how most Christians will nowadays take various passages and treat them as either fact or allegory as befits their purpose. We’ve all seen that here, and I know I grew up with it. Although, at the same time, there are some passages that are so outlandish they stay in the realm of “figurative speak” almost as if by “unspoken agreement” across the board. What makes this so amusing (to me, at least) is modern Christians fail to acknowledge that those passages that are so outlandish to us today were seriously and stringently taken at face value back during the times they were written. Moreover, as you said, the bible was a major tool in opposing discoveries made by those who would study/research/experiment to discover the facts about the world around us. Yet, despite all these quirks and obvious inconsistencies, most every Christian out there will STILL INSIST the bible is… (dramatic drumroll)… THE PERFECT WORD OF GOD!!!.. (clouds parting… angelic harp music playing)…
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My favorite is when you question them about say an obviously false number that appears in the Bible; and they will tell you it is an copying error. But yet continue to insist the Bible is the perfect word of god.
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Yep. It is the absolute PERFECT book… (except for the parts where Man screwed it up by not writing down EXACTLY what god told them to write, along with all the errors when the scribes were making multiple copies). Otherwise, it is TOTALLY perfect. After all, it wasn’t GOD’S errors. It was MAN’S errors. Duh!
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THE HOLY BIBLE, the world’s best selling work of fiction.
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Have you not heard of “Skeptics Bible?”
https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/jos/abs_list.html
- “Her house was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall.”
Since Rahab’s house was built on the wall, how did she and her family survive when the wall fell down? - The priests were able to cross the Jordan without getting their feet wet. Glory!
- God tells Joshua to make some knives and circumcise all the males born during the Exodus at the “hill of the foreskins.”
- It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. [5:6]
- Joshua meets a man with a sword in his hand who claims to be the captain of God’s army. Joshua seemed to think the strange man was God himself, as he bowed down to worship him. Apparently God’s captain agreed, telling Joshua to take off his shoe, since he was standing on holy ground (as Moses was told to do in Exodus 3:5). But whoever was, he disappeared, never to return again. [5:13-
- “And Joshua fell on his face.”
- God’s plan for the destruction of Jericho: Have seven priests go before the ark with seven trumpets of ram’s horns. Then on the seventh day, they go around the city seven times. Finally, the priests blow a long blast from the ram’s horns, all the people shout, and the walls will fall down.
- Keep yourselves from “the accursed thing”. Whatever that is. But be sure to save all the silver and gold for God!
- Joshua and all the elders tear their clothes, fall on their faces, and put dust on their heads. They perform this tantrum because the Israelites lost a battle (God was punishing them because one man (Achan) “took of the accursed thing”).
- “And Joshua … fell to the earth upon his face.” [7:6]
- “And Joshua rent his clothes.”
- Joshua wrote the entire law of Moses on altar stones. (Must have been some big stones!)
- After writing the law on stones, Joshua read every commandment of Moses to the people, along with all the [blessings](. (That must taken several days and been fun to listen to!) [8:34-35]
- “And the LORD discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way.”
God slaughters the Amorites and even chases them along the way. [10:10] - “The LORD cast down great stones from heaven upon them … and they died.”
As the Amorites try to escape, God sends down huge hailstones and kills even more of them. [10:11] - In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark.
- “The Lord fought for Israel.” [10:14, 42]
- “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants.” [12:4]
- The children of Joseph complain about getting only one portion. Joshua tells them that if they want more land, go capture some from the giants or the Canaanites – who had iron chariots, which made them too strong for even God to defeat. (See [Jg 1:19]
- God’s plan for accidental killings: Establish some cities of refuge that accidental killers can flee to so they won’t be killed by “the avenger of blood.” [20:1-9]
- An altar called “Ed”. 22:34
- One man of you shall chase a thousand: for the LORD your God, he it is that fighteth for you."
- God sent hornets to fight for the Israelites. [24:12]
- Just before he died, Joshua wrote “these words” (which words?) in “the book of the law”. Then he put a big stone under an oak tree, saying “this stone shall be a witness unto us.” [24:26-27]
Which has now become one of the foundations for my argument against “Objective versus relative morality”.
Many times we have seen the argument that their objective morality system is superior to subjective morality. But here is the kicker…
Theist pick and choose passages to suit their agenda, thus they are using a subjective system to select certain objective moralities.
Some they use, some they reject. It is all subjective.
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It belongs in the fantasy section in bookstores and libraries.
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It’s funny, as far as I can remember, that story about Joshua asking God to stop the sun in the sky was always glossed over by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses accept certain aspects of science, but reject others such as evolution. But the Heliocentric model of the solar system? Funnily enough, they accept THAT, and yet have no problem with that part of the Bible.
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It’s always slightly puzzled me they don’t see this, but let’s say for the sake of argument a deity exist, and has shared what it claims are absolute morals. Now if we are incapable of using human reasoning to understand that these are moral, then they wouldn’t be much use to us would they, we’d still be subjectively and blindly following rules. Good Nazis managed to blindly follow rules, that’s not morality.
Now suppose we could use our reason to understand whether the deity’s commandments were moral or not. Why would we need divine diktat in the first place, if we can use our own reason?
The whole notion is unevidenced of course, but even were it not, it makes no sense. I’ll trust secular morality everytime, at least I know I can apply my own limited human intellect to it, and reason what the consequences will be.
No condemning or persecuting anyone who just happens to be gay, just because an archaic religious tome demands it. No enslaving women because the bible says something, no meaningless superstition about what I can and cannot do on any particular day. You get the idea, rather I’d look at the consequences of actions and reason why they are or are not moral.
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If you question a theist by putting their feet to the fire, you can easily uncover the fact that they pick and choose what godly moral dictates they follow or reject. Are you opposed to working on Sunday? Have you ever worn mixed fabrics? Have you taken an unruly child to the outskirts of town and stoned it to death? Have you murdered a non-christian?
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Hmmm… 
… Makes me wonder… Do bears read the bible? Just trying to figure out if whether or not they thought it was moral to maul and kill the boys who made fun of the bald guy. Or did they follow God’s command simply because he told them to do it? Okay, sure, people will argue that bears are just wild animals that can’t think like that, I know. They act strictly on instinct without any thought of morals. Okay, fine. Sooooo, that being the case, what excuse do HUMANS have for blindly following the obviously fucked up dictates of their “loving” God?
Just ask a christian if they eat seafood. There’s only about 180 references saying don’t eat shellfish. Yet they’re always clogging up a red lobster about half an hour after Sunday service lol.
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lol well cherry picking is a big Christian quality. They’ve perfected it into an art even when they come on here and try to argue their sky daddy into existence.
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Good valid point. You have basically evidenced what we already know about human morality…that it is genetic. It is not a construct of human thought, it is physical precepts chemically stored in the pre-frontal cortex of each human brain…the same thing, in a more rudimentary way, for bears, bonobos, or other sentient life with a brain. (trump excluded).