Evidence for God from Science

questioner22 wrote:RickD - not sure what happened, but I'll try to remember what I posted earlier.

Did you read the article you sent to me? Did it make sense to you? I read this 2 years ago when my pastor (who upon hearing of this problem text for the first time did the same thing you did...a quick Google search. This was probably one of the first that popped up) - but I re-read it for your sake. I think the guy that wrote that article doesn't understand what it means to 'fulfill' a 'prophecy'. Or maybe I don't. Allow me to illustrate. In Isaiah 1:4, the verse ends with "and turned their backs on him". Not talking about Jesus, but hey, neither is Hosea 11. So if a NT writer were to say that the Jews, in order to fulfill what the prophet Isaiah said, "turned their backs on him" (referring to Jesus)...are you ok with this? If so, rest easy in the knowledge that your faith is absolutely unshakable, my friend. But for those of us who can't put our brain to sleep, and need to rely on things like reason, intellect, and evidence (the tools of the Devil!!), then this will never, ever do.

Alas, sinful nation,
People weighed down with iniquity,
1aOffspring of evildoers,
Sons who bact corruptly!
They have cabandoned the Lord,
They have ddespised the Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away 2from Him.

questioner22 wrote:No no...but I do want to know. That's why I asked. You have proven (several times now) that you can't answer the question. I'm embarrassed to have ever called myself a question if this is what it means to be one. So intellectually disingenuous...really amazing.

questioner22 wrote:Ha - ok...gotta remember my audience. Isaiah was talking about the Lord - bear in mind the OT belongs to the Jews, who neither believe Jesus to be the Messiah, nor believe in the concept of the trinity. You do realize that Jews don't believe that Jesus is the Messiah, correct? Christians added to the OT in much the same way Mormons added to the OT and NT. In any event, Isaiah 1:4 is not a prophecy about how many hundreds of years later, the Jews would turn their backs on the Messiah and crucify him. Can we agree on that? If so (and I hope so), would you have a problem with a NT author saying that the Jews turned their backs on Jesus in fulfillment of Isaiah 1:4?

questioner22 wrote:Ha - ok...gotta remember my audience. Isaiah was talking about the Lord - bear in mind the OT belongs to the Jews, who neither believe Jesus to be the Messiah, nor believe in the concept of the trinity. You do realize that Jews don't believe that Jesus is the Messiah, correct? Christians added to the OT in much the same way Mormons added to the OT and NT. In any event, Isaiah 1:4 is not a prophecy about how many hundreds of years later, the Jews would turn their backs on the Messiah and crucify him. Can we agree on that? If so (and I hope so), would you have a problem with a NT author saying that the Jews turned their backs on Jesus in fulfillment of Isaiah 1:4?

questioner22 wrote:[Facepalm]

You guys are right...I'm wrong. You're smart, I'm stupid. You're very good looking...I'm not attractive.

Here are some other things I'm sure you guys are right about.

Evolution (snicker)...is only a theory. They even call it a theory!!! Unlike the Fact of Gravity, or the Germ Fact of Disease, they call evolution a theory!! So you KNOW it's gotta be wrong. Hilarious! Not sure how they got 99% of biologists to think it's a fact...it's probably a conspiracy! Ever see Ben stein's 'Expelled'?

Slavery in the Bible is indentured servitude ONLY. There's no parallel in the Bible between how Israel was commanded by God to enslave people from OTHER NATIONS and, say, how America enslaved people from Africa. None whatsoever. It's ALL INDENTURED SERVITUDE...totally different!!!

When the Lord, via Moses, told the Israelites to slaughter the Midianite men, women, children, frail 90 year olds, 2 month old baby boys - really everyone EXCEPT the tasty young girls who had never 'known a man'....I'm sure he had nothing immoral in mind. It was probably so the Israelites could teach them basket weaving, or some such skill. Not so they could rape them...when he called them 'spoils of war'...I mean...that could mean ANYTHING.

There are no contradictions in the Bible. Zero. None. Even though a quick Google search will turn up well into the hundreds, they're all very easily explained. And by all, I mean the one or two that your pastor trots out at Easter - you know, the one about whether it was one man, two angels, or two men - at the empty tomb?

Hell is not just a NT concept introduced by 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild. No, the Jews of the OT also believed in Hell. It's not as though the wisest man to have ever walked the face of the earth said (in <a class="rtBibleRef" href="http://biblia.com/bible/nasb95/Eccl%203.19-20" data-reference="Eccl 3.19-20" data-version="nasb95" data-purpose="bible-reference" target="_blank">Eccl 3:19-20</a>) that man and beast are all gonna end up in the ground...dust to dust. That was probably a metaphor...or something.

God is a loving, and altogether JUST God. I mean, even though the Mormon who lives a very moral life - is a loving husband and father, doesn't drink or smoke, goes to Church every week - if he never accepted Christ he'll burn in an eternal torture chamber forever.......and the convicted, serial child molester/murderer who after a horrendously immoral, wicked life sincerely accepts Jesus 2 minutes before he gets executed will be in GLORY with Jesus forever.....that's justice baby. Your weak human brains just can't see that it's just...I mean - who are you to question God??

Signing off, humiliated, wrong, and dejected.

questioner22 wrote:Hi - I was a believer for over 30 years, but since 3 years ago, I would no longer label myself as such. I think there are a lot of gray areas with respect to the debate about God and the Bible, but a few years back, I came across an article that I've yet to hear any of my Christian friends or family even pose a rebuttal to (let alone a well-thought-out response). It's an essay written by Thomas Paine titled "An Examination of the Prophecies", and it was written in the late 1700's I believe. Below is a link.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/paine/proph.htm

I'd love to have someone actually take an hour or so and actually READ the article and provide a response. And by all means, please cross reference EVERYTHING he says in whatever version of the Bible you're fond of. I've had 3 different pastors as well as several family members look at this, and most read it and then never bring it up again. Those that have brought it up end up googling some apologetic response about 'dual prophecies' or something along those lines - mind you, I've never heard this mentioned in a Sunday sermon.

Thanks for reading this post! Please don't reply if you haven't taken the time to read the article - I promise it will be an interesting read, and will challenge your knowledge of well-accepted prophecies that you may have thought were 'bullet-proofe'...most notably the virgin birth prophecy.

Happy Monday.

B. W. wrote:
Add to tit - this as well

questioner22 wrote:RickD - once again, I posted a reply, hit submit, and it's gonzo. Does 'quick reply' not work? In any event, I'll restate briefly.

There is no NT reference to Isaiah 1:4. I was making a point. I was doing what Matthew did with Hosea 11:1. I found the first verse in Isaiah that I could take out of context, and found it in verse 4. Isaiah, when writing verse 4, wasn't prophecying about Jesus - no NT writer is saying that he is - but my question was, would YOU have a problem if anyone were to take that verse (just the last few words) and tell you it was a prophecy about Jesus? If not, then I don't know what else to say. Your faith is unfalsifiable, and therefore bulletproof. But understand that if you can't come up with a scenario that would make you say 'wow - I was wrong about the Bible, and my dearly held faith', this is not at all a good thing, even though your run-of-the-mill Christian thinks that it is.

questioner22 wrote:I guess what I'm saying is that many of the alleged prophecies about Christ were no such thing, and therefore the NT authors who claim that these ARE in fact prophecies about Christ are flat out wrong. Let's take Hosea 11:1 - it's talking about God's love for Israel, and specifically about how God called the Israelites out of Egypt, where they were enslaved. It says "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son." This was a look BACK, not a look FORWARD. It's the exact opposite of a prophecy. Yet Matthew takes this verse - the last half of it mind you - and tries to make it about Christ returning from Egypt with Joseph and Mary thousands of years later. This too makes no sense. If you can't see that a verse talking about a past event cannot possibly be a prophecy about a future event, then I can't help you see it.

Let me put it to you this way - if I said to you that my wife ate an apple last week in order that the Genesis 3:6 prophecy might be fulfilled ("when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it"), you would say "NONSENSE. Genesis 3:6 is about something that happened thousands of years ago, not a prophecy about your wife!! Look at the context of the rest of Genesis 3!" And you'd be right of course. If we're to believe that Hosea 11:1 is also about Christ somehow, then let's continue reading to verse 2. "But the more they were called, the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images." Wow - I missed the part in the NT about Christ sacrificing to Baals and burning incense to images. Can anyone provide a reference to where this is mentioned? Matthew literally tears a half of a verse in Hosea out of context to make it sound like a prophecy, which it is not.

And Paul, as to your point about already addressing the virgin birth prophecy, I don't see how you saying that prophecies can be 're-interested' or re-interpreted' is any kind of answer. So are you agreeing that the prophecy to Ahaz had nothing to do with Christ in its initial iteration by Isaiah? And can you explain why after sitting in Bible believing churches for over 30 years I heard reference to Isaiah 7 being a re-interested prophecy exactly zero times? If I were a pastor, I wouldn't draw any attention to this either, as it can be very detrimental to one's faith to have them really dig into Isaiah 7.

first off, please take the time to review the info from this website concerning Thomas Paine and the work you linked too.

Thomas Paine (this in article below)

There you will find that others answered him soundly from his own era and onward...

Add to it - this as well:

http://www.tektonics.org/lp/painet01.php