Scientists Recover T. Rex Soft Tissue

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Scientists Recover T. Rex Soft Tissue

Post by Moonwynd »

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/

I await the ensuing "Jurassic Park" comments...
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

VERY EFFIN COOL!
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Re: Scientists Recover T. Rex Soft Tissue

Post by Winnow »

Moonwynd wrote:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/

I await the ensuing "Jurassic Park" comments...
Anybody hear that? It's an... It's an impact tremor, that's what it is... I'm fairly alarmed here.
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Post by Marbus »

Sweet! I can wait to see Dollysarus Rex!
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Post by Ebumar »

That's freaking rad.
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Post by Sionistic »

if it is what they think it is, 1.2 billion people n this planet will collectively shit their pants
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

Sionistic wrote:if it is what they think it is, 1.2 billion people n this planet will collectively shit their pants
Why? What are you getting at?
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Post by Adex_Xeda »

I wonder if they could date the soft tissue, "if" that's what it is.
Last edited by Adex_Xeda on March 24, 2005, 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ebumar »

Who knows - its Sion.
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Post by Voronwë »

Dinosaurs are fiction.

The Devil put those bones in the ground 5,799 years ago.
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

Voronwë wrote:Dinosaurs are fiction.

The Devil put those bones in the ground 5,799 years ago.
hehe, most religious organizations don't recognize the exsistence of dinosaurs?(Serious question)
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Post by Jice Virago »

Quite a few do not, especially if they take the bible literally, for numerous reasons.

1) Species that predate man by that length of time kind of conflict with Genesis in a big way.

2) Anything that old conflicts with the biblical approved day of the universe creation in a big way.

3) Remains of extinct species in general that man did not personally wipe out support evolution, at least indirectly.

4) Kind of hard to argue "intelligent creation" when you have a bunch of species that died out eons ago and therefor were not very intelligently designed.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Basically its your typical case of hard scientific fact debunking biblical superstitious nonsense and the crispy cult giving it the ostritch treatment.
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Post by Voronwë »

Midnyte_Ragebringer wrote:
Voronwë wrote:Dinosaurs are fiction.

The Devil put those bones in the ground 5,799 years ago.
hehe, most religious organizations don't recognize the exsistence of dinosaurs?(Serious question)
most religions (in the industrialized world) obviously understand that the universe is billions of years old, and that evolution occurred etc. Hell even the Catholic church - notorious for standing in the face of obvious scientific information (the earth orbiting the sun), does.

Creationists at large though cannot reasonably acknowledge the existence of dinosaurs. It is logically incongruous with their beliefs.

Orthodox Jews do not believe that dinosaurs existed. They literally believe that the universe is about 5,800 years old. A few years ago, some Israeli yogurt company put dinosaurs on their packaging to market it towards children. The Orthodox Jews in Israel raised all kinds of hell.

I'm sure fundamentalist Hindus and Muslims have similar views. Any scriptural literalist has to believe in crazy fairy tails like that. But i'm not saying most Christians don't feel that way.

The official positions of the major Christian denominations on this planet is of course consistent with the scientific facts that animal life has been on this planet for millions of years, and around 200,000 years ago our species evolved from human-like primates.
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

My question is, how can any body not think Dinosaurs exsisted? It's not todays discovery show any more that they existed than the fucking bones all over we have found and put back together in Museums all over the place.

It's like sayign you don't believe in cell phones. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
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Post by Tenuvil »

Voro, you do realize that crispie fundie wackos like Adex think the Genesis story was factually accurate, and the universe and all that it contains was created ~5k years ago, right?
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Post by Winnow »

Horner said he hoped museums around the world would start cracking open bones and looking for soft tissue in their fossils.
Editors Note: This April Fools joke resulted in the destruction of 40 T-Rex full fossilized skeletons worldwide.
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Post by Voronwë »

well i wouldnt lump Adex as a "crispie, fundy, whack"

but yes i realize that creationists really believe what i said above, which is why i made the joke =).

creationists though, are not any particular branch of Christianity, though some denominations (Baptists for example) have a larger proportion of creationists within their ranks than others.

I would suggest a lot of creationists are part of churches that are not formally part of a 'mainstream denomination (catholic, episcopal, lutheran, etc)'. not that you cannot know Christ outside of those or anything. My point is that, divorced from these historically established organizations, you lose just that: accurate historical perspective.

There is not an intellectual control mechanism over the types of teachings that occur. That isnt all bad, but most Christian denominations have been through anti-intellecutualism fits in their history, and they came out the other side, with a more reasoned world view.

anyway, losing focus, but yeah while many Creationists probably feel they have a mainstream opinion, i don't think the facts bear that out.
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Post by masteen »

I'm hoping we get some clonable cells, make Jurassic Park, and film a couple seasons of "Survivor" on it.
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Post by Voronwë »

seriously, i would watch that.

i think it is total BS that after 7 years or whatever nobody has died on survior.
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Post by archeiron »

masteen wrote:I'm hoping we get some clonable cells, make Jurassic Park, and film a couple seasons of "Survivor" on it.
I want to believe that this was an independent discovery, but I believe that you found this story AND that line on the FoH Screenshots forum! :P
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Post by Canelek »

I actually met a creationist-type while fishing... I was discussing with a friend the geologic formations along a local river when a person who we were with asked me: "You don't believe in all of that 'the Earth is billions of years old' crap?".

Odd, I thought....

Anyways, religious segway aside....

I think it is pretty cool that they may have found soft tissue samples, practical use or not, it certainly may help filling in the gaps in the history of Earth. I hope we get more information on this find as the scientists do their thing. :)
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Post by Ebumar »

Voronwë wrote:seriously, i would watch that.

i think it is total BS that after 7 years or whatever nobody has died on survior.
That's what they want you to think. I have my theories, but no real proof. How hard could it be to cover up someone's death? Just take all the footage they are in - out, and just tell the other contestants to not even talk about it. Then never ever release anything on the matter.
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Post by Adex_Xeda »

The bible does mention dinosaurs. Job has a couple of references to two creatures much larger than an elephant. Job is one of the oldest books. The creatures were mentioned in a wa that assumed the reader has seen them.

I'm not saying that this means the world is 5k old or anything, just that the bible does present the idea of man having common knowledge of really huge animals bigger than elephants.
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

Adex_Xeda wrote:The bible does mention dinosaurs. Job has a couple of references to two creatures much larger than an elephant. Job is one of the oldest books. The creatures were mentioned in a wa that assumed the reader has seen them.

I'm not saying that this means the world is 5k old or anything, just that the bible does present the idea of man having common knowledge of really huge animals bigger than elephants.
It's possible scientists are way off when they say something is 7 million years old. We will never know how acurate their dating really is. It could be they are only 5-6 thousand years old.
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Post by Jice Virago »

Actually, Carbon Dating (based on the decay of the Carbon 14 atom, if memory serves) is incredibly precise. Saying we don't know how accurate it is is a lot like saying the world is flat and the center of the known universe at this point; you would be regarded as a superstitious fool by free thinking people, and rightly so. I regard people trying to use the bible to refute scientific fact like someone arguing that people could fly by missing the ground because they read it in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; not only are they fools, they are a danger to themselves and others.

Also, Adex, that passage you are referencing doesn't really specify what the hell the creatures are. And I think all but the fundies can agree that artistic liscence (read: gross exhaguration) took place in the crafting of the bible, with the whole wolrd made in 6 days and the entire planet being populated and then repopulated by single pairs of species crap. That said, I think the more credible argument to make would be that the passages listed in Job might be things like Mammoths (which we know co-existed with the earliest tribes of man) or simple exagurations of existing animals (ie how snakes got made into dragons, Goliath, ect). Given that you yourself have referred to the bible as parable, I think that you have to agree it would be ridiculous for people to believe that any living human being actually saw dinosaurs based on some cryptic blurb in the book of Job.
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Post by Lohrno »

Midnyte_Ragebringer wrote: It's possible scientists are way off when they say something is 7 million years old. We will never know how acurate their dating really is. It could be they are only 5-6 thousand years old.
It's possible, but highly unlikely.
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Post by Neroon »

When they say there is a margin for error in the dating method, they mean that when they say something is about 42 million years old, it could be only 40 million, or maybe 44 million. It doesn't mean there is a 5% or whatever chance it could have died last Tuesday.
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Post by Xzion »

I still cant logically see how something as overpowering as a T-rex or teradachtyl (sp) could have fallen victim to extinction or evolution into a much weaker specie...i doubt there was a lack of resources or smaller herds of predators...then again i have no idea how the hell an animal as slow, weak, and large as a cow with no real defense or evasion has survived in the wild so long without human harvesting
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Post by Fash »

ice.... age....
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Post by Xzion »

Fash wrote:ice.... age....
ahh reptiles, guess that makes sense...then again something that massive could have slowly adapted, or migrated near equator

but still...how did something as stupid, weak, and defenseless as a cow survive for so long?
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Post by Canelek »

Global climactic changes such as an ice age or the theoretical ELE meteor that may have hit around the Yucatan area.... Dinosaurs dying off are certainly not a Darwinian thing.

The most accepted theory at this time is the Yucatan meteor(or asteroid). I think scientists studied Iridium content of soil along the circumference of what is believed to be on big motherbitch crater. Of course, I have not read up on this stuff in years...

As far as the Bible goes...well, back when the bible was written, there weren't exactly archaeological expeditions for fossils. The whole science of evolution and dinos was still far off and so, didn't really fit into the storyline of the bible.

Not to mention the Earth was still flat back then. ;)
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Post by Adex_Xeda »

Jice, you look at life though a very different filter than religious folk. Sometimes such filters can close you to understanding things that are in conflict with you hold to be true.

You are saying"I just don't get those christians, they seem like kooks."
I say I understand. From your frame of reference, christians would look crazy. I'm sure you can just call our frame of reference the result of poor parenting and rejection of logic and science, but that wouldn't be accurate. Many great thinkers, and scientists are people of faith. They must be seeing something that your filter screens out.

I have a filter too that blinds me to some things, as do we all. I don't understand a world without God, yet I am aware that my personal bias, and filter could be blocking me from that secular understanding.

Because of that awareness I'm not quick to write off things that conflict with my moral code and understanding. I don't call the secular person a nutcase. I allow for the chance that the other guy sees something that I don't. I urge you to do the same.


As far as the passages in Job they're reasonable. Allow me to demonstrate.

Behemoth has the following attributes according to Job 40:15-24
It “eats grass like an ox.”
It “moves his tail like a cedar.” (In Hebrew, this literally reads, “he lets hang his tail like a cedar.”)
Its “bones are like beams of bronze,
His ribs like bars of iron.”
“He is the first of the ways of God.” (This phrase in the original Hebrew implied that behemoth was the biggest animal created)
“He lies under the lotus trees,
In a covert of reeds and marsh.”

Elephants don't have tree-thick tails. This is a possible reference to a dinosaur. The interesting thing is that it is mentioned in a way that assumes the reader has seen one. This suggests that dinosaurs and humans existed at the same time.
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Post by Canelek »

Interesting passage, Adex. It does leave the door wide open, but it is certainly interesting nonetheless.
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Post by Jice Virago »

First off, Dinosaurs and humans did not co exist on the planet. Ever. Every reptile larger than a Komodo bit it long before even primates existed. This is verfifiable fossil fact. Most likely cause is the ELE discussed here, chocking off the food supply and making larger animals unable to be sustained by the eco system, but its also possible that early mammals simply more successful at scavanging the eggs than their reptilian predescessors were, or any of a number other possibilities. Evidence also suggests that a lot of the smaller species of reptiles of that era evolved into birds.

But there is an ancient creature with a big thunderous tale and bronze bones that has been recorded in another part of the world......

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King Geedorah made it into the Book of Job, evidently.
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
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Post by Hesten »

Midnyte_Ragebringer wrote:My question is, how can any body not think Dinosaurs exsisted? It's not todays discovery show any more that they existed than the fucking bones all over we have found and put back together in Museums all over the place.

It's like sayign you don't believe in cell phones. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
And you just correctly described a good part of the problems with fundamentalists, Christian or otherwise :)

But yeah, it is getting pretty ridiculous when people can look at direct proof of something and then just ignore it because it dont fit in with their views. I should try that someday, could be fun to see how long i can ignore my boss if i believe that idiots wearing red suspenders dont exist :)
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Post by Canelek »

lol Jice, I think we can clearly not bother with talks of homo sapiens-sapiens or even our predecesors being in the same hackeysack circle with large reptiles--although, it would make for a somewhat humerous Larson comic.

Can we just kick the drivel of religious debate out of the rickshaw for a moment and discuss the possible importance of what may well be the most significant find of our time? Ok, maybe it is nothing, but still...finding whole cells of something such as this is quite a step... :)
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Post by Voronwë »

this is not even the biggest scientific find of this year, let alone "our time".

there have been leaks from NASA that they did discover life on Mars, but the paper is in review or whatever. that is a rumor though, may not be true.

and by life i mean like bacteria.
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Post by Marbus »

Well they found a dried up ocean bed, finding life couldn't be too far away.

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Post by Adex_Xeda »

Just for the record. There is plenty of data out there to strongly suggest years of separation between humans and the last big dinosaurs.

If I had to tell my kid something about this subject I would tell him that our best guess is dinosaurs died off well before us. However, I would caution him to remember that human reasoning is limited, there is a chance that we're interpreting this sequence incorrectly.

I would say that just about every other christian that I know holds opinions similar to mine. We're definately not the crazed nutcase sterotypes that you some of you like to lambast around here.
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Post by Marbus »

Adex,

I would agree that I can understand nothing without God. However what many fundamental Christians seem to forget is that God also gave us the ability to understand and think for ourselves.
1st Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Much of the Old Testament was written for a group of people who's understanding was that of a child, they needed things explained to them in that frame of refrence. Even in much of the NT most people just "didn't get it." Even Jesus' desciples didn't understand what was going most of the time...

However as Paul came to greater understanding as shown in his letter to the Christians at Corinth, we too should grow and learn using the gifts God gave us.

We have had almost 2000 years since then yet some people still want to stick their heads in the sand. I know people like Winnow think that anyone of faith is doing that but I have seen and felt God's presence and power in both my life and in those of some of my friends. There are some people that don't believe you should go to the Dr but rather just pray about it... because of this my wife's cousins' wife's family has a bunch of gimped up people in it.... car wreck, multiple broken bones... wouldn't go to the Dr.

Based upon your faith Adex I'm pretty sure you would say that's nuts! Another example is some of the affiliations of Bob Jones University... some of those people believe the world is flat... FLAT!

We KNOW the world isn't flat, we KNOW how to reset bones and how to stop infection with medication. Yet some people choose to turn a blind eye... The exact same thing is going on with Evolution here and Dinos... we have factual evidence of how things work yet a few people, more than the freaks that think the world is flat and/or don't go to the Dr. though, won't except that.

Rather than using the intelligence God gave them they squander it and don't search things out for themselves or even try to see other points... that's sad... IMHO.

I'm not condeming these people or you... do I totally disagree with their standpoints? yea... and I probably shouldn't use the word freaks either as these are my brothers and sisters in Christ. What I try to do as often as I can though is to pray for them, that they may be given understanding.

On this very Holy of Days I pray that we might all gain greater understanding in all areas.

Cheers!
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

Neroon wrote:When they say there is a margin for error in the dating method, they mean that when they say something is about 42 million years old, it could be only 40 million, or maybe 44 million. It doesn't mean there is a 5% or whatever chance it could have died last Tuesday.
uh-huh. But how do they know that? Have they tested something and said it was 7 million years old and they turned it over and read the date and were all stoked giving eachother high fives about how close they were? You don't know, they don't know. They think they know, but they really don't know.
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Post by Jice Virago »

I could go searching for links about how carbon dating works and how it has been proven, but I think we can safely conclude that you know how to use Google. The fact is, it is accurate within decades of precise dates and that is, in geological terms, incredibly precise. Ignoring the fact of its accuracy does not make it any less true.

On topic, the only real significance of this find will be perhaps some clearer examples of dinosaur genetics and a better understanding of wether Dinos were truely cold blooded or not (some have suggested that later species, like the T-Rex, were not). Its an amazing find, but not the scientific find of our time. I could name a half dozen astronomical finds that eclipse it off the top of my head, plus the rumored bacteria discovery on mars Voro mentioned.
War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man's-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them. . . .

Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.
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Post by Lohrno »

The only way it could be flawed would be if somehow the decay of that atom could change over time. There is no evidence to support that that's possible, so...
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Post by Lohrno »

Midnyte_Ragebringer wrote: uh-huh. But how do they know that? Have they tested something and said it was 7 million years old and they turned it over and read the date and were all stoked giving eachother high fives about how close they were? You don't know, they don't know. They think they know, but they really don't know.
Well if you are going to make no assumptions of knowledge, then you will be in a pitiful state of indecision for the rest of your life. Perhaps they will be proven wrong later somehow, but if no one ever tried guessing because "we really don't know" we would have no progress. That's the way science works, they say "I think this is true because of this..." Then they go test it. If it turns out to be right for a while, they go on that assumption until later maybe they find out they were way off or only slightly.

BTW, you'll notice they don't say 7,439,341 years and 40 days. They don't have the precision.

Carbon dating also isn't the only method of age verification, there are also methods like seeing how far down it was and doing geological surveys, etc.
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Post by Winnow »

I find it humorous that every time a scientific discovery is made, the religious types have to fit it within the workings of their holy scriptures.

If Lord of the Rings was written back in ancient times, Gandalf would be god, Saruman would be the devil and Bilbo Baggins would be jesus and you'd be trying to fit these scientific discoveries into the context of those yarns.

Come on people! Fantasy Books are great entertainment but lets keep them out of the way of our scientific progress and search for knowledge.
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Post by Voronwë »

splitting hairs, but radioactive dating is a pretty well established method.

it is used thousands of times a day, in thousands of labs around the world. The principles of radioactive decay are hardly esoteric theoretical physics either.

they are also firmly established. If you don't believe it, sit next to some radioactive plutonium for awhile.
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Post by Midnyte_Ragebringer »

Voronwë wrote:splitting hairs, but carbon dating is a pretty well established method.

it is used thousands of times a day, in thousands of labs around the world. The principles of radioactive decay are hardly esoteric theoretical physics either.

they are also firmly established. If you don't believe it, sit next to some radioactive plutonium for awhile.
I completely understand Voro. All I am saying is, we really don't know. As a species, we have had the techonology and ability to perform carbon dating, or any other kind of scientific dating methos, for about 100? 150? years? So, we truly only could date thing as far back as we know it really was left behind.

We could perform these tests and they seem as acurate as hell, but we really don't know for sure. So, while you are willing to bet your house on this shit, I won't. To me it's like the shit people say about the sun blowing up and us not knowing it for weeks, months, or years later. I find that stupid and refuse to believe it until I see them blow something up in space on live TV.

I love science, facts, etc. But to me much of that stuff you are holding as factual, concrete stuff, is as mind b oggling as the religious ones, claiming Moses parted the red sea.
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Post by Homercles »

Youre comparison between the Lord of the Rings and the Bible is very poor.
The Bible, rather The New Testament, are personal observations and experiences with (although distorted over the centuries) of a real life human being named Jesus Christ. Even the Old Testament has some basis in history. Genisis is hogwash yes, but Exodus does represent a real situation in which the slaves of egypt fled. I believe Moses was a real life person. Did he part the Red Sea. No. Did he speak to a burning bush. No. But he did live. And his actions did mark him as a man of history.

The Bible definitely has its outlandish claims and fantasies. But it also bases its writings on real people. King David was real. King Solomon was real. Moses was real. Jesus was real.

Bilbo is not real. Frodo and Gandulf are not real.
You scoff at the bible as if it is a work of pure make believe. Do you hold the same views of Egyptian history? Was Cleopatra a figment of imagination? Or King Tut?

You need to seperate the religion from the history. Then you can view the bible in more objective terms. And maybe appreciate it as one of the most successful written documents in world history.
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Post by Voronwë »

microprocessors have only existed for a couple of decades, but thousands of people put their lives in "their hands" every day.

we actually do know how accurate radioactive dating is. The theoretical calculations match the observed measurements.

if you choose to view things as either 100% known or shelve it into the "unknown" slot, then i think it is difficult to make any decision. You obviously don't need this much evidence for making decisions on political people. You've never met Hillary Clinton, but i am positive you "knew" all you needed to know about her years ago. :p

you can either choose to make a decision based on a probability of it being correct on the order of 99.9999999999% or 0.0000000001%

sure both are posible. but possible doesn't really mean much :p

every decision that most of us make in our daily lives hinges on probabilities. the money in my 401k, i invest in stock because they are much more likely to go up in value than bonds or cash.
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Post by Winnow »

Homercles wrote:Youre comparison between the Lord of the Rings and the Bible is very poor.
The Bible, rather The New Testament, are personal observations and experiences with (although distorted over the centuries) of a real life human being named Jesus Christ. ...

...Bilbo is not real. Frodo and Gandulf are not real.
You scoff at the bible as if it is a work of pure make believe. Do you hold the same views of Egyptian history? Was Cleopatra a figment of imagination? Or King Tut?

You need to seperate the religion from the history. Then you can view the bible in more objective terms. And maybe appreciate it as one of the most successful written documents in world history.
You are correct that my example isn't a good one. It would have been much more accurate if I used real people like Michael Jordon being Jesus and Hitler being satan. Extremely well known people for our time that did extraordinary things that will most likely get blown out of proportion as time goes on. (even moreso if it was back in the day when there was so little written down). The stories about Michael Jordan would eventually evolve into him being able to fly, cutting through hordes of men with blazing speed to deliver the sacred sphere to the holy hoop...you get my point.

Jesus was the Michael Jordon of his day. He's as real as Michael Jordan. That's about it. The rest is excessive, distorted drama. Sister Teresa, if she lived back in the day when we couldn't actually observe that she was just a very nice lady, would have been some extraodinary human with powers from beyond. If she's a saint, then you can pretty much go back in time and figure those characters were about as special as she was. Nice but not anything unexplainable.
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