Societies don't have to be secular to be modern

[The Brain]

I'm sure all the jews in the world will applaud the public service announcement that comes from killing millions and millions of people.

Except I think very very few of all the jews in the world actually think that the flood literally happened.   

Without the flood the covenant to never agains flood the world makes no sense since god doesn't murder almost all of humanity. Without the flood the redemption of a single good non-jew by god makes no sense because god hasn't saved a single man since he didn't kill everybody else.

God (pbuh) can eat the cake and have it.

[Barrister]

I'm sure all the jews in the world will applaud the public service announcement that comes from killing millions and millions of people.

Except I think very very few of all the jews in the world actually think that the flood literally happened.   

Without the flood the covenant to never agains flood the world makes no sense since god doesn't murder almost all of humanity. Without the flood the redemption of a single good non-jew by god makes no sense because god hasn't saved a single man since he didn't kill everybody else.

I think I'm done discussing this with you.

You keep wanting to argue against this strawman who accepts the Bible as literal truth.  Nobody here is arguing that.

[Pat]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory

Science has much better flooding myths anyway

[grumbler]

The descent from Noah is more significant than the descent from Adam, as Noah was universally considered to be a good guy. The earlier Adam story is more confused - Adam wasn't himself particularly a good guy - he disobeys God and gets cursed, and his "good" son gets killed by his "evil" son. Adam fathers another afterwards (Seth), and presumably everyone around at the time of the flood was descended from Seth or Cain.

Uh, no shit!    Who was the wife of Seth?  Of Cain?  Were their wives their sisters, or their mother?

[Valmy]

Science has much better flooding myths anyway

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unravelling the mystery,
That all started with the big bang! BANG!

[The Brain]

God is such a great guy. You know when he gave everyone a million dollars? Well he never did it but it shows just what a generous person he is.

[Viking]

I'm sure all the jews in the world will applaud the public service announcement that comes from killing millions and millions of people.

Except I think very very few of all the jews in the world actually think that the flood literally happened.   

Without the flood the covenant to never agains flood the world makes no sense since god doesn't murder almost all of humanity. Without the flood the redemption of a single good non-jew by god makes no sense because god hasn't saved a single man since he didn't kill everybody else.

I think I'm done discussing this with you.

You keep wanting to argue against this strawman who accepts the Bible as literal truth.  Nobody here is arguing that.

I dont' agree I'm arguing against a literalist strawman. I'm saying

1) The Bible has no moral value if I'm the person deciding which bits are relevant to morality.
2) The Bible has no truth value if I'm the person deciding which bits are true and which bits are allegorical.
3) The morale and redemptive value of allegorical bible stories are dependent on their truth.
4) If the Bible is to have any moral or factual value I should be able to find the morale and fact without picking and choosing which bits I like and can prove.

[Pat]

1) The Bible has no moral value if I'm the person deciding which bits are relevant to morality.
2) The Bible has no truth value if I'm the person deciding which bits are true and which bits are allegorical.
3) The morale and redemptive value of allegorical bible stories are dependent on their truth.
4) If the Bible is to have any moral or factual value I should be able to find the morale and fact without picking and choosing which bits I like and can prove.

Especially since religious people are so fond of the old Brothers Karamazov argument that if there is no objective morality, then everything is permissible. And then they say you can interpret the bible any way you like. So much for "objective" morality.

[Valmy]

I dont' agree I'm arguing against a literalist strawman. I'm saying

1) The Bible has no moral value if I'm the person deciding which bits are relevant to morality.
2) The Bible has no truth value if I'm the person deciding which bits are true and which bits are allegorical.
3) The morale and redemptive value of allegorical bible stories are dependent on their truth.
4) If the Bible is to have any moral or factual value I should be able to find the morale and fact without picking and choosing which bits I like and can prove.

Well I think this is a cop out.  It is not a question of picking out which parts you like so much as which parts speak to you and have value for you.  Also why would the lessons of an allegory be dependent on the allegory's truth?  Doesn't that sorta mean it is not an allegory at all?

[Malthus]

The descent from Noah is more significant than the descent from Adam, as Noah was universally considered to be a good guy. The earlier Adam story is more confused - Adam wasn't himself particularly a good guy - he disobeys God and gets cursed, and his "good" son gets killed by his "evil" son. Adam fathers another afterwards (Seth), and presumably everyone around at the time of the flood was descended from Seth or Cain.

Uh, no shit!    Who was the wife of Seth?  Of Cain?  Were their wives their sisters, or their mother?

Not to mention the "sons of God" who were also, as it were, added into the genetic mix:

When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with [a] man forever, for he is mortal ; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

[Valmy]

Especially since religious people are so fond of the old Brothers Karamazov argument that if there is no objective morality, then everything is permissible. And then they say you can interpret the bible any way you like. So much for "objective" morality.

I have a feeling the people claiming #1 and the people claiming #2 are not the same people.

[The Minsky Moment]

Which historial personages claim to have known and met him?

All the "rightly-guided" Caliphs, and Muhammad's own family (Aisha, Fatimah, Ali, etc)

In which sources do we find these claims? And when are they written down?

Writings on the lives of Muhammad and the Rashidun emerge in the early 8th century.  (although there are early Christian sources which mention his name).  Which is to say, they were written easily within the lifetimes of many people who also would have lived during the Caliphate of Muwawiyah, who in turn lived contemporaneously with Muhammad in his youth.  If Muawiyah invented a fictitious person "Muhammad"  his own contemporaries would know this to be utterly false, which makes it hard to believe.  But if he did not connive with such an invention, then those alive during his reign would have been easily been able to put the lie to any later effort to invent such a personage.   It strains credulity to imagine such an extraordinary hoax being perpetrated.  And to what end - if (hypothetically) no Muhammad existed - why not ascribe the tenets of Islam to the widely respected (and powerful) Rashidun Caliphs?  Why invent from whole cloth a character of an illiterate merchant of no particularly distiguished lineage?  Why not ascribe the role of prophet to the rich and presitgious Abu Bakr or the literate and athletic Umar?

[Malthus]

Especially since religious people are so fond of the old Brothers Karamazov argument that if there is no objective morality, then everything is permissible. And then they say you can interpret the bible any way you like. So much for "objective" morality.

My own opinion is that there is an "objective" morality - based on the ethics of reciprocity - but the exact ambit of this in any particular situation can never be known with absolute certainty; you can get pretty close however.

It seems to me that it is you & Viking who are making the "all or nothing' type argument: you seem to want religious types to be literalists, or find their opinions incoherent.

[Barrister]

Especially since religious people are so fond of the old Brothers Karamazov argument that if there is no objective morality, then everything is permissible. And then they say you can interpret the bible any way you like. So much for "objective" morality.

Just because the Bible can be difficult to interpret at times it doesn't follow that there is no such thing as objective morality.

And really the moral lessons of the Bible are pretty damn easy to pick out 98% of the time.  Honour God, turn the other cheek,  treat others as you would treat yourself, give to poor...

[The Minsky Moment]

God (pbuh) can eat the cake and have it.

That's why they call him omniscient.