The Touchy Relation Between Religion And Science...

This is true, also, especially when you consider the vehement exhortations of "fire and brimstone/eternal damnation" ultra-conservative evangelists and other highly-prominent and religious leaders, over the course of many, many decades.

Science, as a general rule, USED to be a fairly safe topic to discuss without fear of any sort of backlash; however, today, even talking about the weather can lead into the global warming crises, which, in turn, can lead to some strong disagreements regarding politics and global warming.............

 

I should say something about the three specific examples of "plagiarism' mentioned by Wally: Adam and Eve, Noahs Ark, The battle of Armageddon. If the Adam and Eve story was plagiarized from something, I don't know what that would be. There are some details that suggest Mesopotamian influence. Yahweh forms Adam from the dust of the ground and breathes life into him. He is made in God's image and likeness. In the Babylonian version, Ea (AKA Enki) , God of water, knowledge and crafts, and his consort Nimhursag (AKA Ninmah), the Mother/fertility goddess, decide to create humans as slave labor, to relieve the gods of burdensome work. They created the humans from clay, but needed a missing ingredient--god's blood--to complete the animation. Fortunately, there was a defeated god left over from Marduk's cosmic battle with the forces of Tiamat, who they could sacrifice to supply that. Afterwards, they celebrated, got drunk, and argued over who should get the most credit for this creation. Any obvious connection to the Genesis account? Well, they sculpted the humans out of dirt or clay. But God didn't create them to be His slaves. And God's breath instead of a god's blood provided the animating force.

There is another hint of Babylonian mythology in the forbidden fruit story, although the incident seems pretty far removed from the original. Nimhursag learns that Enki is molesting their granddaughter and decides to teach him a lesson. She uses his own seed to sow eight plants in her garden, and warns him not to eat them because it will harm him (knowing that if she tells him not to do it, that's exactly what he'll do.) And he does, and becomes pregnant in eight parts of his body. Lacking a birth canal, he is in agony, until Nimhursag relents and helps him deliver the offspring. The last one out comes from his rib and is called lady Ti (rib). So here we have a forbidden fruit, but the disobedient one is a god, not a human. We even have a rib, which of course the Biblical Yahweh took from Adam to make Eve. Is this close enough for a plagiarism charge? Certainly a change in emphasis.

Noah's Ark is more direct--obviously based on the Gilgamesh epic of Utnapishtin, derived from the Akaddian tale of Atrahaxis, based on the Sumerian account of Ziusudra. Obviously, the Genesis account is derivative. Still, there are significant differences. In the Mesopotamian myths, after the gods create humans, they multiply too well and are causing enough noise and disturbance to annoy Enlil, the head god, who decides they must go and sends a flood to wipe them out. Enki, their creator, can't abide their extinction, so he tips off a human to build an ark according to his specifications. The humans survive, and the other gods, suffering from the loss of their slaves, support Enki. For the most part, it's the same story as the Bible, except God's motive is to punish iniquity instead of to get rid of a noisy bunch of humans.

Finally, there's Armageddon, from the : הַר מְגִדּוֹ‎ Har Məgīddō or “Mount Megiddo” , mentioned in Revelation 16:16 as a place of final battle judgment against the enemies of God. This seems correlate with the prophecy in Zecharia 12 that Judah will be defended in a battle with its enemies. Megiddo is a very real place, strategically located on a narrow pass on the most important trade route of the ancient Fertile Crescent linking Egypt with Asia Minor and Anatolia. As such, it was the scene of numerous ancient battles, beginning with one in the fifteenth century between Thutmoses III and the Caananites. It is a geographic and historical reality, and the legends growing up around it don't seem to be copied from anybody else. So no plagiarism that I can see.

 

Looking over that list again, another that stands out is: "Many concepts in the Bible were sourced from the apostle Paul and not from Jesus the Nazarene Jew." So true. Paul is the very first source, and he left quite an imprint. It was Paul who made Jesus' sacrifice and death rather than his life and teachings the focus of the religion. Paul gave us the Paschal Lamb analogy: Christ came to earth to die for our sins. Also, Paul gave us the "salvation through faith alone and not through works of the Law." That made Christianity popular among Gentiles by eliminating the idea that they had to keep kosher and become circumcised. The unfortunate side effect is an undue emphasis on belief as the key to salvation.

But putting this in broader perspective, we know the teachings and actions of Jesus through the gospels, which differ from one another in important respects. It's still a sufficiently compelling picture for me to take as my main guide to meaning and morality.

The rest of the list seems to be a series of facts that we know through science that were not known to the ancient authors of the Bible. That's true, but I would say beside the point. Anybody taking the Bible literally as the "Word of God" and the Bible as a kind of science manual as well as a moral guide will have trouble with science and life. It seems obvious that what we have in Genesis and other parts of the Bible is a heroic chronicle of the Jewish people and a set of myths comparable to Aesops' fables, Homer's Iliad/Odyssey, etc. Fans of Joseph Campbell know that myths aren't worthless lies. They're metaphors intended to illuminate basic truths through analogy or allegory. I owe my Christian faith to a passage in Genesis, but it would never cross my mind to take it literally! It's all metaphor: the six day creation, the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the forbidden fruit, etc. Here we have two humans living in paradise, and they blow it cuz they want more and can't get their minds off the damned apple. How quintessentially human! This to me illustrates the problem Buddhists call Upādāna or taṇhā--insatiable grasping. Is the story factual? Of course not! Is it true? Profoundly true.

 

That's been going on for centuries. In fact, I think it used to be worse.

Scientists sometimes say silly things. Trying to find naturalistic explanations for metaphorical miracle stories in scripture seems to me to be a futile endeavor. There is, of course, no evidence of a Great Flood that covered the entire earth, although ancient civilizations tended to be built on rivers, so the experience of floods seems to have been common. The biblical flood may also have been a memory of the catastrophic flood in the Black Sea about 7,600 years ago. Is the Black Sea Flood Noah's Great Flood? - Historic Mysteries. The Red Sea most likely was the shallow, marshy Sea of Reeds (Yam Sūph), according to the Hebrew, and the Exodus may actually give two interspersed accounts of it: the P (priestly) Hollywood-style version (Exodus14:15-18; 23) that captures popular imaginations, and the older J (Yahwest) version for those more naturalistic inclined : "and Yahweh drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land."(v.21) Anyhow, scienitists have advanced theories as to how it could have happened naturally.The Science of the Red Sea's Parting | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ion-for-the-parting-of-the-red-sea-in-exodus/
Yeah, it might be possible, but the timing? It happened just as the Israelites reached the "sea" and Moses raised his arms, and ended when they got to safety and Pharaoh's army was engulfed? I'd say , still a miracle--an extraordinary happening requiring an extraordinary amount of evidence. Or a metaphor! Scientists can be gullible. Same goes in spades for the star (comet) of Bethlehem. Sure, the comet travels from Mesopotamia to the little town of Bethlehem. And what did it do then? Just hover?

As I understand it, the prevailing scientific theory is that entire universe happened as a result of a "Big Bang" nearly 14 billion years ago--"a tremendously powerful genesis of space-time that sent matter and energy reeling outward". According to the Big Bang theory, everything in the entire universe was initially condensed in an infinitesimally small singularity, a point of infinite denseness and heat. And then it happened. Space inflated by more than thirty orders of magnitude in an incredibly short period of time-- 10^-32 of a second. And there was Light--the most ancient radiation in the universe, still detectable as microwave radiation (CMBB).. Had the thrust at the beginning been stronger, the cosmic matter would have been quickly diluted. Had it been weaker, the universe would have collapsed before the stars could make heavy elements. Goldilocks strikes again!

What could have caused this? The question “What came before the Big Bang?” can't be answered scientifically, because it's outside the realm of science. How Did the Big Bang Happen? | Astronomy.com
This, however, hasn't stopped scientists from writing about it, with considerable confidence! As in particle physicist, cosmologist, and anti-theist Lawrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing. Well maybe not exactly nothing, unless we consider a quantum vacuum nothing. But a "deeper nothing" than we know--involving the absence of space itself (those who find the notion of degrees of nothing problematic need to show more respect in the presence of a "scientist".) Kraus has developed a model based on certain arrangements of relativistic quantum fields that some scientists think is plausible Physicist Lawrence Krauss turns on his own.
https://case.edu/artsci/sa_krauss.pdf, but others view as pure speculation. On the Origin of Everything (Published 2012) Physicist David Albert wonders how those relativistic quantum fields came to exist in a state of nothingness. On the Origin of Everything (Published 2012)

Anyhow, the notion of a universe from nothing (ex nihilo) was first proposed by Theophilus of Antioch in St. Augustine in the second century and given definitive formulation by St. Augustine in the fourth century. But if one reads Genesis carefully, it says plainly: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
So there seems to have been something there already , consistent with the ancient view that the gods formed the universe from primordial Chaos. Relativistic quantum fields, no doubt!

Today, of course, thanks to the wonders of String theory, we have more universes than we can shake a stick at. Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence that any of them other than ours exists, and no prospects of obtaining such evidence in the future. Krauss had become an outspoken critic of string theory. (Hiding in the Mirror, 2005). As he says in A Universe From Nothing, "we still have no idea if this remarkable theoretical edifice actually has anything to do with the real world".

 

That's good to know, indeed, and quite re-assuring..........

 

Christians have always used the Bible to spread hate and violence. They make up the majority. Very few Christians spread the gospel of love and peace. The word Christian means INTOLERANCE, HATE, VIOLENCE. These are just a few words that mean Christian.

 

Of course scientists getting together with clerics to rewrite the Bible is unlikely to happen. Progressive Christians have no trouble understanding Genesis as myth. And when I die, I expect my body to go into a crematorium, and my "soul" to cease its existence, since it probably depends on a functioning brain. I think heaven and hell are states of mind achievable on this earth. ("The Kingdom of the Father is spread out everywhere upon the Earth, and people do not see it." Thomas 113). The immaculate conception has nothing to do with virgin birth(it's the doctrine that Mary was born without original sin), and neither is likely to have happened, at least with humans--although some Komodo dragons seem to have been able to pull it off. Otherwise, I agree.

 

Not true. The Quakers are Christian and quite peaceful. So am I. I'm a Methodist, and I think my church has been generally peaceful and loving--although I dislike its hangup on gay marriage and ordaining gays. Many are leaving the church over this issue. Interestingly, it's mainly the conservatives who are doing this, since they apparently think the current policy is too soft on gays. My Sunday School friends are hopeful that if we just bide our time, the homophobes will be gone and we'll be able to change the "Discipline" on the matter.

 

Not always. Mainly just since Constantine and Theodosius I, although some ugly Anti-Judaism is expressed in the gospels of Matthew and John. Christian proto-orthodox and Gnostic factions said unkind things about each other, but there wasn't much violence until Constantine. Before then, Christians were mainly the victims of violence. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. " (Lord Acton)