Offshoot discussion of "what religion are you" thread

[IronParrot]

about a) - why does that matter? Do you think God failed to consider that? Perhaps he chose that language for a good reason.

Because language is a mechanism not only for the transmission of knowledge, but its storage. A language with a limited vocabulary cannot express everything that might need to be. God could have inspired an entire book prophesying the creation of the Internet, but the Hebrews wouldn't be able to write it down with any degree of precision.

about b) - absolutely not!! Pardon me, but that's artifact/accumulated-knowledge snobbery, don't you think? Now they may not have had as much KNOWLEDGE, but that is NO reflection on their intellectual capabilities. I heard a good statement once that I think fits this situation very well - roughly, "the same wheel that proved its first maker a genius would prove a wheelmaker 200 years later a dunce." IOW, whoever first thought of the wheel was absolutely brilliant, and I'm sure the wheel was rather a rough and inefficient one. But after hundred of years of wheel making, OF COURSE a wheel would be better - that, however, doesn't mean the wheel MAKERS are any smarter.

Look at the degree of education or literacy in a given society. That's a good indicator, and that's more what I'm referring to here (not the size of the human brain). I would say that human beings as they are currently are far "smarter" (and far more capable of being so) because comprehensive education is more prevalent. We live in a society that no longer believes that all things fundamentally reduce to earth, fire, wind, water and Captain Planet. There's no confusion with knowledge here, because sometimes, an item of knowledge is an essential foundation to further understanding. You could claim all you want that the Greeks could have come up with electronics, but their primitive concept of the atom as a solid unit of infinite hardness precluded them from doing so. Though we do have to give them credit for coming up with the atom concept.

about c) - same answer as for a), and I think you're again mixing up amount of KNOWLEDGE for intellectual capacity when you use the term "dummies". There were many, many brilliant people in the ancient world. You know Pythagoras' brilliant work, but that is no credit to you - YOU didn't come up with it!

But as I said before, Pythagoras' work - while revolutionary for their time - was just a baby step towards where we are today, when we deal with triangulating non-Euclidean space (i.e. the fact that the world is round). Perhaps I was unclear: by intellectual capacity, I was not referring to the ability to think. I was referring to the restriction on such thinking due to the lack of a good educational base in ancient societies. You can only do so much in a lifetime.

According to the Catholic Church (pre-1960), the heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth. Thankfully, they lifted their ban on Galileo, or their credibility really would be shot.

Um, I would say BY DEFINITION that God has severely simplified things. If a being that is omniscient has to communicate with beings that AREN'T, then obviously the info HAS to be severly simplified. That doesn't mean that it's not SIGNIFICANT, however.

Well of course the Bible is significant! But that doesn't mean it's true to the letter, or that it's the Word of God at all. My very point - with which you have here concurred - is that the Bible is full of holes.