Monday, December 02, 2013

Creationist ken Hamm upset that Atheists are reading the Bible and using something called "reading comprehension."

Courtesy of Answers in Genesis:

 It seems like atheists will go to pretty extreme lengths to combat the words of a God they don’t even believe exists. A recent article from the Religion News Service reports, “Atheists use a popular Bible app to evangelize about unbelief.” The article contains interviews with a number of young atheists who have chosen to use YouVersion, one of the most popular apps around, as a way of trying to shake the faith of Christians. 

Now, YouVersion offers over 700 translations of the Bible for free in its app, in an effort to encourage biblical literacy worldwide. The article states, “But Lauren, a 22-year-old chemistry major from Colorado, is not interested in the app’s mission to deepen faith and biblical literacy. A newly minted atheist, she uses her YouVersion Bible app to try to persuade people away from the Christianity she grew up in.” 

And, unsurprisingly, these atheists are focusing on supposed contradictions in the Bible to make their points. Lauren, the atheist quoted above, states, “Reading the full story with all its contradictions and violence and sexism, it should make you think, ‘Is this really what I believe in?’” 

Sadly, atheists like Lauren haven’t approached Scripture with the desire to have these problems resolved by believers who are equipped to answer such claims. No, instead they have come with a bias against God and His Word, and they desire to damage the faith that others have in God. These skeptics are intentionally searching for supposed problems in Scripture—so they can spread more disbelief. (So to be clear, what Hamm is saying is that Lauren is simply not intelligent enough to understand the complexities of a book that was written to spread the word of God to a less educated population over two thousand years ago.)

For example, Lauren explains that marriage is a “pet issue,” so she intentionally targets people who post on social media sites that marriage is between one man and one woman. Lauren attempts to use instances of polygamy in the Bible to somehow prove that the Bible is contradictory on the issue of marriage. But she can only do this by taking Scripture out of context. (And in this case "taking it out of context" means "reading the words" instead of having them explained to her by a priest or minister.)

Other atheists try to use the many translations on YouVersion to show that there are supposedly many variations of the biblical text: “The biggest thing for me is seeing how much the version will change the meaning of passage [sic]. It can make a pretty big difference in how you interpret it.” While it’s true that there are many different translations of the Bible, there’s a big difference between a literal translation and a paraphrase of Scripture. A literal translation provides the same meaning today that people would have understood when the Bible was written, whereas a paraphrase is someone else’s rewording of Scripture into everyday English. Bible scholars typically look for literal translations, not paraphrases. 

But are these atheists interested in the answers to their objections? I would submit that many of them aren’t. One well-known atheist was quoted as saying that one of the “beautiful side effects” of free Bible apps is that “nothing makes you an atheist faster than reading the Bible.” (That "well know Atheist," by the way is Hemant Mehta,the "Friendly Atheist.")

So let me get this straight the problem that Hamm has with this comparative analysis of Bible translations is that there are some translations which do not line up with the version that HE thinks we should be reading?

And that they are "paraphrased" rather than "literal" translations. 

So using that logic then the oldest known Bible on earth would be the one that ALL Christians should look to for guidance, right?

Well that version of the Bible is known as the Sanai Bible. And this is what IT says about the life of Jesus Christ:  

Hand-written on animal skins in a dead Greek language, the Sinai Bible was purchased by the British Museum from the Soviet Government in 1933 and is now displayed in the British Library in London. Sometime after its purchase, English-language translations were published (Manuscript No. 43725 in the British Library) and extraordinary new information about the earliest story of Jesus Christ became available to the world. The great comparative value of the Sinai Bible as the world’s oldest available Bible is today universally accepted, and its discovery provided great embarrassment for the Church’s modern-day presentation of Jesus Christ, for it revealed that newer Gospels are the depositories of large amounts of fabricated narratives and intentional perversions of the truth. 

The Vatican concedes that Mark was the first Gospel written (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Farley Ed., Vol. vi, p. 657), and that it later became the prototype of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In the Sinai Bible’s version of the Gospel of Mark, we see dramatic variations from its modern-day counterpart with an extraordinary omission that later became the central doctrine of the Christian faith … the resurrection appearances of the Gospel Jesus Christ and his subsequent ascension into heaven. 

The Sinai Bible’s version of the Gospel of Mark starts its story of Jesus Christ when he was ‘at about the age of thirty’. No reference is made to Mary, a virgin birth, Joseph of Arimathea, a Star of Bethlehem, or the 51 now-called Old Testament ‘messianic prophecies’. Words describing Christ as ‘the son of God’ do not appear in the opening narrative of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 1:1) as they do in today’s Bibles, and the modern-day family tree tracing a ‘messianic bloodline’ back to King David is non-existent in the Sinai Bible. 

The Sinai Bible’s version of the Gospel of Mark ends its story with Mary Magdalene arriving at the tomb and finding it empty. Yet, in modern-day versions of the Gospel of Mark, resurrection narratives now appear (16: 9-20), and the Vatican universally acknowledges that they are forgeries; 

‘The conclusion of Mark is admittedly not genuine … almost the entire section is a later compilation’. (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Vol., iii, p. 274, published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop Farley; also, ‘Encyclopedia Biblica’, ii, 1880; 1767, n. 3; 1781, and n. 1, on ‘The Evidence of its Spuriousness’) 

The Vatican claims that ‘the resurrection is the fundamental argument for our Christian belief’ (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Farley Ed., Vol., xii, p. 792), adding that a resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ is the ‘sine qua non’ of Christianity, ‘without which, nothing’ (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Farley Ed., Vol., xii, p. 792). St. Paul agreed, saying; ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain’ (1 Cor. 15:17). Yet no appearance of a resurrected Jesus Christ is recorded in the oldest Gospel in the oldest Bible in the world. Nor are there resurrection narratives in any other old Bibles, for a comparison shows they are non-existent in the Alexandrian Bible, the Vatican Bible, the Bezae Bible and an ancient Latin manuscript of Mark code-named ‘K’ by analysts.

Well alrighty then, I guess that these earliest versions of the "Word of God" are the ones  that we can all put our faith in. Right?

Besides how can we really take any argument put forth by a Creationist seriously?

17 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:00 AM

    "So let me get this straight the problem that Hamm has with this comparative analysis of Bible translations is that there are some translations which do not line up with the version that HE thinks we should be reading?"

    In other words Gryphen, Bible-Believing Conservatives want you to believe the way they believe and celebrate holidays and make observances the way they do, and kiss the ass of the troops (but cut their aid.) It's like Sharon Angle said to Fox News:

    "we wanted [journalists] to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported. And when I get on a show and I say send me money to SharronAngle.com, so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com."

    So if we throw them Gotcha questions like, "What do you read," or "Do you believe in the separation of church and state," they say we willfully believe the filter of the media that misrepresents their words and their actions and whatnot.

    Never before have I ever seen a less accountable lot in the American public, that depends on donations and tithes because this grift is too good to give up for a rill job.

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    1. Olivia5:57 AM

      If Christianism goes the way these fools have planned, there will be huge problems with the differences in the way the Bible is interpreted. They like to pretend they are united in their mission to bring Christian sharia to our country but in time they will be murdering each other over minor points in translation. Most Protestant religions have been similar in hatred and derision of Roman Catholic beliefs. The fundies and the Catholics had momentarily bonded in their idiocy against women's and gay rights and other political issues. We are seeing a few cracks forming in those bonds with the new pope's advice against capitalism. Those cracks will become chasms. Already, many Catholics are torn between their "love" of the Pope and the Church and their even stronger love of money and subjugation of certain groups of people. I predict that in many parishes there will be sermons exhorting Catholics to "pay no attention to the media reports of the pronouncements of the Pope and let us interpret all this confusion for you", just as they used to do with the Bible.

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  2. Anonymous5:01 AM

    Good lord, would you let this man alone around your children?

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    1. Anonymous6:14 AM

      No. He has a very high creep factor.

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    2. Agreed! Totally creepy.

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  3. I poked holes in this when I was a kid. “If Jesus returns to judge the quick and the dead, what’s the point? The dead already know if they’re in heaven or hell.” I was such a nice child.

    There was also a quiet backstory about the body being stolen by the disciples, for what reason, I’m not sure. I don’t think Jews believed in the resurrection of the physical body, and I don’t remember Jesus predicting it. In my community, most believed in the resurrection, but some silently doubted it. They might have believed in heaven, but a body wasn’t going to leave the tomb on its own.

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    1. Anonymous8:04 AM

      Always good to see you here D. There are strong references to Jesus in Kasmir..India..studying the eastern religions.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxwqAYSsKjY

      Peter Owen Jones, an Anglican priest, makes some very good research vids available on youtube.

      The B.

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  4. Anonymous5:26 AM

    Link to the page where the Sinai Bible is discussed
    http://www.vatileaks.com/_blog/Vati_Leaks/post/A_glaring_omission_in_World%E2%80%99s_oldest_Bible/

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  5. Anonymous7:15 AM

    Just in time for the holiday season, an anti-religion organization is planning on erecting dozens of atheists billboards in an effort to let fellow non-believers know they're "not alone."

    The Greater Sacramento Chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has paid for 55 different billboards this year, all of which will go up in Sacramento, Calif., the Monday after Thanksgiving, according to local station News 10.

    "It's because atheists are starting to speak up and they're beginning to identify each other," chapter president Judy Saint told the station. "There are a lot of non-believers and this time of year, they feel like they're all alone. This is not directed to people who enjoy their church, who enjoy their religion. That's fine. But we're talking to people who don't know that atheism is okay."

    The billboards, all featuring area residents sharing messages like, "I worship nothing and question everything," or "Science. It works," are part of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation’s overarching campaign to try to get atheists to "come out of the closet," Fox News reports.

    “The whole month of December is taken over in a celebration of the religious beliefs, in particular Christianity," FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor told Fox. "And it’s just as if the whole month turns non-believers into outsiders."

    Not everyone is excited about the planned signs, however...

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/27/atheist-billboards-california-holiday-push_n_4350411.html

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  6. That was really interesting, Jesse. I usually skip your atheistic postings, but this one was definitely worth reading. I never thought the Bible made a lot of sense, but the article above really lays it out. How many revisions can a group of men (who think they already have the answers) come up with before they get it to reflect the way they'd like it to be?

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  7. I like to point out this portion of the bible to people using it to base their "pro-life" stance.

    https://www.bible.com/bible/406/num.5.erv

    As The Evil Bible blog explains it:

    "Numbers 5:11-21 The description of a bizarre, brutal and abusive ritual to be performed on a wife SUSPECTED of adultery. This is considered to be an induced abortion to rid a woman of another man’s child."

    There are many other passages there that explain how God is NOT Pro-Life.

    http://www.evilbible.com/god%27s%20not%20pro-life.htm

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  8. Anonymous8:34 AM

    First off that picture is creeping me out...

    I have several relatives who have been upset with me when I explained my view of the bible.... it is a book wrote (and later added to, edited, blatantly changed) by ancient peoples that were trying to explain the world around them. Most of the stories are parables not literal events.... There is no other evidence that Jesus ever existed than the word of the modern Bible.
    Does any of this really matter? The real message is that we should be loving, humble, and compassionate to our fellow human (and the planet). Today more people seem to use the Bible as a weapon than for guidance.
    I personally lost faith in it years ago when I studied religious history, that is when I realized it is just a way to control people...

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  9. Boscoe8:41 AM

    The way I see it, if exposure to the "word of god" isn't enough to bring someone "to the light" then maybe it's not really the word of god. 'Cause you'd think it would be child's play for a god to make that much work correctly.

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  10. Anonymous9:04 AM

    If someone else's faith is dependent on trying to get others that don't share their faith then I'm guessing their faith isn't very deep or real.
    Personally, I think all middle Eastern religions like christianity and Islam( oh yes, they are very intertwined even though it sets off Fundies when you tell them that) are all loony.

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  11. Anita Winecooler5:47 PM

    When they start with this as their premise, it's downhill from there:

    “Atheists use a popular Bible app to evangelize about unbelief.”

    How does one "Evangelize" "Unbelief"? There's something not kosher with that Hamm guy. How does one "Discuss" a piece of fiction with believers without referencing the work?

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  12. Anonymous2:50 AM

    Guilt by assosiation, is the atheists main tema all over the line, and somehow I dont think they understand this isse clearly, to flung moronic insults and assosiations regading religion and religious people.

    The problem is not religion per see, look at the mass slaughtering done by Buddists, is the Budda a pedofilic insane morderer, huh.
    And like Ateism that claims science is the ultimate truth, then I start to wounder, how litle knowledge do they have at all regading the history of science and so caled non belivers, and they will go to any lenght to deny this what i write now, about the horrific consequences of the darwinian fallacys of survival of the fitest. That "faith" is the basis of eugenics, the race theories, and so on. the medical science have their own crash track record and even then when they where attaced by outsider as now, the rethoric was the same.
    its NOT the present science its something wrong with, but anyone questiening it.
    The same goes the the follower of the moronic rants from this Dawkins, promoter of pedofilic practising.
    Nice fellow, huh.

    No, all in all, the present level is frightening low, their arguments are simply putt, dumb, their lack of knowledge is aparent to anyone stil with a half functional braincell left intact up there.
    tsk, tsk

    peace

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    1. Anonymous9:37 AM

      spelling & reasoning? for the first, use spell checker, for the second ... don't know!
      ahh, ahh

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