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Patterns of Evidence Movies
- Thread starter Iymus
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Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
Eddi, I think you need money to see more than a trailer. Got money? If not, you may be out of luck.
exchemist
Veteran Member
Crank movies directed by Tim Baloney.
You'd do better reading what actual scholars say about this, rather than some "believer" trying to make what he grew up being taught to be actually true. Sometimes, it's better to move forwards, than backwards. There's too much modern evidence about the material to simply reject it in favor of a "magical" answer, even if that means you have to change how you think about your faith.
Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
I don't know where you live, but I live in the U.S. Everybody's a know-it-all and has an opinion about something or other. There are even crazy people here who make a living claiming that Einstein's theory of special relativity is true. Can you believe it? Takes all kinds, eh? More power to 'em, if it floats their boats.
Yeah, I'm in the U.S. as well. I'm not sure if you're saying that these videos actually represent real scholarship or not. But trying to say Moses wrote the books where he records his own death, for starters, is a really hard sell to modern rational thinkers. Some prefer pseudoscience over real science because it preserves the magic of the story, not having to do the emotionally challenging work of re-imagining our myths in the face of modern scholarship, but I would not be one of those.
Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
I'm not afraid of the truth. I'm inclined to prefer it to myths. But unless someone is willing to take the time to lay out their case for their claim to a truth and connect the dots for me or help me to connect the dots, when presented with a bunch of dots, I'm on my own and I connect some but not all as well as I can. Did Moses write his own biography from conception to death? Nah, ... I'm an avid amateur genealogist, and you won't catch me claiming to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
That said, when someone says: The Exodus never happened, and starts taking an ax to everything in the Bible, Hebrew and Christian. I'm going to holler: "WTF are you doing?!"
Just to clarify, when I say myths, I mean our stories. I don't mean untruths. I mean our stories we pack with meanings, regardless of their actualities on the ground. That is what mythologies are. They are meaningful stories.
People have a difficult time being able to still retain the meaning, if they find out the way that they viewed that story, is not also historically accurate and factual. Others, are able to make that transition from the literal to the symbolic nature of stories as part of later stages of faith development, research has demonstrated.
Everyone relies on someone to tell them how to connect dots. For me, I check to see if the dot-connector is taking into account the factors other, more modernist dot-connectors are looking at. If they aren't, and are making errors, then that helps sway what voice I'm going to give more authority to.
But why is that "taking an ax to everything in the Bible"? To understand that the Exodus likely did not happen in actuality, does not mean that therefore everything in the Bible is a "lie". That simply is not true. Truth, carried in a story about a fictive epic event in history, is about the meaning of the story, not about telling accurate history.
They are the "origin stories" of a tribal people. "This is where we came from," they tell their children at the campfire. Whether or not they are historically accurate, does not change the fact that that is their story. Nor does it change the meanings found in that story as great truths.
Some people struggle trying to see that, because as said above, they are yet unable to hold meaning symbolically, rather than the meaning being fused to a literal understanding of the details of story. There is a correct word for these stories, and that is Parables, truth told through fictions. Were the characters in Jesus's parables literal people, or did they represent any one of us?
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Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
I delayed responding to your last intentionally, because it's an intelligible post worthy of consideration and a tempered reply; and because the exigencies of life intervened today and I wanted to take more time to think some things through. As it stands, this thread has caused me to put off cobbling together a new and unrelated thread that I have a hankering to do. However, here are a couple of thoughts that will have to tide you over until after I can get my thread together and up. [I don't multitask well.]
My house of cards doesn't collapse if I decide that the story of the Fall in early Genesis may have started out as a story that Noah told a child when asked: "Granpa, why does the snake, of all the reptiles, crawl on its belly but the others run on four legs?" Nor do the cards fall if I decide that the story of Noah and the ark could have started out as an old man's explanation of why a rainbow appears after a rain. Between you and me, the cards wouldn't all fall even if someone could prove to me that Jesus had a set of human parents and did not have an existence prior to conception. My cards would fall, however, if someone could prove to me that Jesus never existed or that he was not executed, was not resurrected, and did not ascend to the Father.
Now, just because I say my cards would fall, in the latter case, doesn't mean I would become suicidal or spend my remaining days in depression. If my cards fell, I would still experience shame and guilt again, although perhaps a little less often than I do. Between Noah and the ark and Jesus' resurrection and ascension I have room for some flexibility. Abraham could have been Jack. But whatever his name was, I am hard pressed to imagine that there never was "a first believer" or that the first was a Chinese girl named Li Chen.
You may ask why my flexibility declines so radically by the time of the Exodus. I'll certainly think the matter over some more, but my immediate response at this time is: since when do humans initiate covenants with their gods that last and sustain them for milllenia?
Point taken. My father was a Lutheran Pastor: I remember him telling me, in my early teens, "Just because a story is a myth, doesn't mean it isn't true."
I'm well-acquainted with the range of views that folks can have of their Scriptures in general and the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures in particular. I am far from viewing my Scriptures literally throughout, or completely metaphorically or allegorically, much less, as pure fiction.
My house of cards doesn't collapse if I decide that the story of the Fall in early Genesis may have started out as a story that Noah told a child when asked: "Granpa, why does the snake, of all the reptiles, crawl on its belly but the others run on four legs?" Nor do the cards fall if I decide that the story of Noah and the ark could have started out as an old man's explanation of why a rainbow appears after a rain. Between you and me, the cards wouldn't all fall even if someone could prove to me that Jesus had a set of human parents and did not have an existence prior to conception. My cards would fall, however, if someone could prove to me that Jesus never existed or that he was not executed, was not resurrected, and did not ascend to the Father.
Now, just because I say my cards would fall, in the latter case, doesn't mean I would become suicidal or spend my remaining days in depression. If my cards fell, I would still experience shame and guilt again, although perhaps a little less often than I do. Between Noah and the ark and Jesus' resurrection and ascension I have room for some flexibility. Abraham could have been Jack. But whatever his name was, I am hard pressed to imagine that there never was "a first believer" or that the first was a Chinese girl named Li Chen.
You may ask why my flexibility declines so radically by the time of the Exodus. I'll certainly think the matter over some more, but my immediate response at this time is: since when do humans initiate covenants with their gods that last and sustain them for milllenia?
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