the_grip on 29/1/2004 at 22:24

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In which case i would respond that those people are as guilty as the people who perpetrate the wrongdoings.

Of course, one is limited to what one can do (i.e. i alone can't stop the Iraq war), but everyone should do what they can, especially when what they can do does make a difference.

Agent Monkeysee on 29/1/2004 at 22:30

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What? Where would that get us? You said there's such a thing as righteous anger but we can't feel it because we're not righteous. You then defined righteous anger, implicitly, as anger without hatred. I went "hurf?!" and asked how exactly one can have anger without hating <i>something</i>. Maybe hate is too strong but in order to get pissed about something you have to dislike something about it.

So either "righteous anger" is anger that has no component of dislike, in which case God's a frickin' bastketcase, or "hatred in your heart" only seems to be referring to hatred of a particular person in which case I can and have experienced "righteous anger". Either that or "righteous anger" is just regular anger experienced by God so we can't experience by definition. But that's just a special ANGER TITLE for God so it's not particularly interesting to differentiate it from regular anger. He might as well be "righteous happy" that he's "righteously eating" his "righteous breakfast".



The search for the City of Troy was done by an independent maverick looking for fame and fortune. The bastard got lucky but it wasn't an undertaking endorsed by the academic community. And for good reason, because as it turns out Schliemann didn't find the Troy of the Illiad, he found a much more recent city on a site that had apparently been abandoned and rebuilt a number of times.

It was a valuable find but I can hardly fault archaeologists for not signing up on the first boat to Turkey after reading the Illiad.

Are you honestly arguing that legitimate archaelogists should have spent resources looking for an ancient city based purely on the account of an oral poem passed down for hundreds of years and finally written down some 4000 years ago?

The point, that you seem to be missing, is this: given a particular account that is part legend, part religious text, and part historical account there is <i>no way</i> in lieu of independent sources to seperate fact from fiction. Thus, until you have a method of doing so you have no choice but to either choose something random to investigate and possibly waste a whole lot of time and money <i>*cough*</i>atlantis<i>*cough*</i> or don't bother to follow up on any of it. It's simply not a fruitful way to conduct research.

Now, without knowing anything about these 5000 SOURCES ORDER YOURS TODAY and without knowing anything about the kind of professors that have rebuffed you and the kind of issues you were bringing up that were rebuffed I can't say whether this is still a reasonable position to take on the historical accuracy of the biblical text. But if it's true that ALL of the Bible is still brushed off as irrelevant for historical and archaeological study I have to assume that there's a good reason for it that these 5000 sources don't alleviate. There simply isn't some monolithic black list that researchers are forbidden from using and if there is something useful to be gleaned from the Bible I'd should think that someone would be doing so by now.

*Zaccheus* on 29/1/2004 at 22:34

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I've also had 'firsthand experience' with schizophrenics who thought God was talking to them. It's very sad when that happens.

But you know, there are also folks who think their dead loved ones are still alive, but that does not mean I'm crazy just becaue I believe my wife is still alive.

fett on 29/1/2004 at 22:41

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bloody psychopaths

the_grip on 29/1/2004 at 22:45

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i must have misread your post - we should say there is a difference between hatred and dislike, and i didn't realize you were equating the two.

i should disclaimer that i surely can't define righteous anger absolutely since it would discredit what i'm said previously that we don't experience it. So this does contain some speculation, but i would say that it is possible to be angry without hating someone (at least a little bit for a few seconds, if not more).

But let's steer away from that because i think we're moving away from your original question. Consider God to be holy and perfect for argument's sake, 100% through and through. If someone violated that holiness or went against God in an evil manner, then would he not be just in being angry about it? However, it would be righteous because it would be right for him to defend that holiness. Does that make sense?



Not at all, but there were quite a few academic scholars who joined him in his search.



i would disagree here. You can read a Biblical account and surmise that locations/battles/etc. are historical, however, the presence of spiritual activity at that place could be filtered out.



I agree that there is no need to just randomly start digging up sites to see if they were there. However, if they would bear historical significance, then i would think that it would be fruitful. But my main gist that i mentioned a few times earlier is that this does not discredit the Bible's historacity (again, sp?), rather, on some points nobody's bothered to look.



However, there can be historical evidence in the Bible gleaned to link events together that is often not considered. i do also believe that the Bible is gaining credibility as a historical reference, however, there is still a bias against it held by a large number of historians, and that would be an error.